Sodom and Gomorrah (Original Definition): A place that is full of people behaving in a sexually immoral way.
Sodom and Gomorrah (Modern Definition): A place called America with its Capitol located in Oklahoma.
Former CBS News president Richard Salant (1961 - 64 and 1966 - 79) explained the major media's role: "Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have." ...and to this very day most Americans haven't noticed they're being brained washed! ~ N. Hooben
Saturday, September 16, 2023
The last line of a book report: "...the book is a devastating critique of Soros’ cynical plan to undermine public safety by financing the election of William Kunstler-style defense attorneys masquerading as prosecutors. It deserves to be widely read."
This is where we are headed!
Dystopia
A very bad or unfair society in which there is a lot of suffering, especially an imaginary society in the future, after something terrible has happened.
The Legal Road to Dystopia
The election of a rogue prosecutor can completely alter the operation of the criminal justice system. By the time voters notice, it’s too late.
Editor’s Note – This essay was originally published at Law & Liberty on September 11th, 2023.
Kim Foxx in Chicago. Alvin Bragg in New York. George Gascón in Los Angeles. Larry Krasner in Philadelphia. Chesa Boudin in San Francisco. Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore. Rachael Rollins in Boston. Kimberly Gardner in St. Louis. Most Americans are familiar with at least some of these names from news reports of urban carnage, wanton lawlessness, and lax enforcement (or non-enforcement) of laws designed to protect persons and property from predation. Their names, and unfortunately many others—collectively comprising the prosecutors in nearly half of America’s most populous cities—form the ranks of pro-criminal, anti-victim zealots whose election campaigns were funded by billionaire activist George Soros and other leftist oligarchs. At least 72 million Americans are estimated to be subject to the misrule of these rogue prosecutors.
Instead of fighting crime and representing the interests of the law-abiding public, these so-called prosecutors do the opposite: overseeing sharp increases in crime and advocating on behalf of criminals. Public safety—per Federalist #3, the paramount goal of civil society—depends on the arrest, conviction, and punishment of criminals. The rule of law requires the even-handed application of duly-enacted laws. Removing these civilizational underpinnings creates social turmoil that far-left activists hope to exploit. Soros’s bold gambit is transforming America’s cities by shattering norms, producing chaos and disorder, and, as urban areas become uninhabitable, hastening the exodus of businesses and residents.
The resulting “broken windows” phenomenon is not an accident; nor is it spontaneous. Radicals wishing to undermine the stability of society—to establish what some pundits have termed a state of “anarcho-tyranny”—assiduously follow Saul Alinsky’s playbook. One of “community organizer” Alinsky’s tenets in Rules for Radicals was: “Whenever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.” Using Union General William T. Sherman’s Civil War tactics in his infamous March to the Sea as a “classic example,” Alinsky observed that “the South, when confronted with this new form of military invasion, reacted with confusion, panic, terror, and collapse.”
Progressive prosecutors wreaking havoc in many American cities are seemingly intent on replicating this result: the collapse of urban communities. The common agenda of Soros-funded prosecutors is to undermine public safety and thwart the rule of law through non-enforcement of criminal laws, unwarranted leniency toward dangerous offenders, the release of violent felons from incarceration, and the refusal to detain dangerous or repeat criminals prior to trial by eliminating the cash bail system. Pursuant to progressives’ playbook, the resulting “emergency” would justify an extraordinary “solution.” Using a variation of the Cloward-Piven strategy, the ultimate goal of these rogue prosecutors is to consolidate power in the hands of trusted apparatchiks. In this case, however, the “emergency” is wholly manufactured, and therefore avoidable.
Rogue Prosecutors, written by two former prosecutors now affiliated with the conservative Heritage Foundation, Zack Smith and Charles Stimson, is the most detailed summary I have seen of the rise of “Soros-funded prosecutors”—covering in comprehensive detail their origins, beliefs, and strategies, as well as the money and individuals behind the movement. The rogue prosecutor movement, since it began in 2015, has caused incalculable damage to public safety across the nation. With over 300 pages of text and more than 1,100 footnotes, Rogue Prosecutors is impressively thorough, with detailed analyses of crime rates (before and after), recidivism, the intellectual lineage of the radical anti-prison/anti-police (or “abolitionist”) movement, and the failed experiment of “bail reform.”
The authors unmask Team Soros, naming names, following the money, and lifting the curtain on the shadowy network of affiliated PACs, foundations, and shell organizations used to bankroll rogue prosecutors. Drawing on the work of noted criminologist Barry Latzer and others, the authors also debunk the many fallacies and misconceptions regarding crime rates, incarceration rates, the composition of prison populations, and the often-overlooked demographics of crime victims. The book closes with some sensible suggestions for alternatives to incarceration (diversion programs such as domestic violence courts, drug courts, and the like), and a brief vignette about the experience of a major city (San Diego) prosecutor who beat a Soros-funded challenger. It can be done.
As Smith and Stimson explain, the abolitionist movement is based on two myths aggressively promoted in woke academia and progressive media outlets: First, that America faces a “mass incarceration” crisis that can only be solved by reducing arrests, shortening sentences, and de-populating prisons. Second, that our criminal justice system is systemically racist due to the disproportionate number of African-Americans who are arrested, convicted, and incarcerated. Leftist critics risibly refer to America’s criminal justice system as “the new Jim Crow.” Because the criminal justice system is a tool of oppression, the argument goes, it must be drastically reformed in the name of “racial equity. Never mind that African-Americans commit a disproportionate percentage of crimes—including violent crimes—usually against victims who are disproportionately African-American. By promoting lawlessness, rogue prosecutors harm the very communities they claim to help.
Citing the work of their Heritage colleague, Mike Gonzalez, the authors explain that the roots of the abolitionist movement date back to Marxist-inspired New Left intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s, including two-time Communist Party USA nominee for Vice President, Angela Davis, who wrote an influential 2003 book entitled Are Prisons Obsolete? In an enlightening survey of the scholarly literature, the authors illustrate that the radical origins of the abolitionist movement overlap with those of Black Lives Matter. Proponents of both seek to overthrow what they refer to as the “carceral state,” a term that equates imprisonment for committing a crime with political (or racial) oppression.
The heart of the book, however, consists of chapter-length profiles of each of the eight rogue prosecutors listed in the opening paragraph. (Boudin was recalled in 2022, Mosby was defeated in 2022 [while under indictment], and Rollins, promoted to U.S. Attorney by President Biden in 2022, resigned to end an ethics probe in 2023.) The profiles do not present a flattering portrait of the state of democracy in America, to say the least. Uniformly contemptuous of public safety, enthralled by identity politics, rigidly hewing to far-left positions, and, most importantly, grossly incompetent at their jobs, these rogue prosecutors elicit sympathy for the unfortunate public they represent. Perhaps their constituents will learn that elections matter.
The book is a devastating critique of Soros’ cynical plan to undermine public safety by financing the election of William Kunstler-style defense attorneys masquerading as prosecutors. It deserves to be widely read.
The astounding (and confounding) aspect of the abolitionist movement is the rapidity with which it evolved from a fringe academic theory into disastrous public policy affecting many of our major cities. Thank Team Soros, and their network of academic and media wingmen, for that. The authors bemoan the “cottage industry of law review articles” that has emerged in recent years demonizing our criminal justice system as a “racial caste system,” and worse. Many urban voters have, sadly, adopted the false, anti-police narrative peddled by the rabid critics of law enforcement.
The strategy of supporting the candidacy of committed “progressives” for low-visibility, down-ballot positions such as district attorney or state’s attorney was undeniably ingenious. Instead of mustering vast legal resources to fight the death penalty, case-by-case (as the ACLU and other groups have done for decades); engaging in expensive statewide political campaigns to elect progressive candidates to the legislature, hoping to achieve a sympathetic majority; or lobbying Congress, state legislatures, or city councils to pass laws aligning with the progressive agenda, in 2015 Team Soros devised an alternative strategy: cherry-picking political campaigns for the office of district attorney in target cities.
Deep-pocketed donors (and George Soros certainly qualifies in this regard) discovered they were able to finance the election of like-minded attorneys who shared the donors’ ideological agenda, using “dark money” front groups with innocuous names, such as the “Safety and Justice” PAC and the “Fair and Just Prosecution” project. Running successful campaigns in low-turnout races generating little public visibility requires modest resources compared to playing in national or even statewide politics. The $40 million Soros has spent so far backing rogue prosecutors is a fraction of what he and other special interests contribute to candidates in other races, but it represents a vast sum for typically low-budget prosecutor campaigns. Accordingly, Team Soros is able to easily outspend incumbent prosecutors with limited resources. Moreover, urban electorates are more susceptible to campaign themes featuring identity politics and anti-police rhetoric. So far, it is a winning strategy.
In large cities, a single elected official—the district attorney—wields as much power as the entire legislative and judicial branches. Prosecutorial discretion can override the work of the legislature. Who needs to abolish the death penalty if prosecutors no longer seek it? Who needs to de-criminalize drugs, “public order” crimes, and similar offenses (including shoplifting and petit larceny) if prosecutors can decide simply not to charge those arrested for such crimes—so-called “prosecutorial nullification”? Homeless encampments can be created, virtually overnight, by non-enforcement of vagrancy laws and bans on “camping” in public spaces. Judges can only punish criminals who are arrested and charged.
Buying district attorney seats in this fashion allows Team Soros to circumvent the legislature and the police and the courts when, once elected, rogue prosecutors selectively and arbitrarily choose which laws to enforce—or not. The election of a rogue prosecutor can completely alter the operation of the criminal justice system in that jurisdiction. By the time the voters realize the consequences of their decision, it is too late. Unless the rogue prosecutor is recalled, as was the case with Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, the public is stuck with the consequences until the next election. In the meantime, the Soros-funded rogue prosecutor may have gutted his staff by firing experienced career prosecutors—causing irreparable damage.
My only quibble with Rogue Prosecutors is that the book lacks an index and bibliography, and the consecutively-numbered footnotes don’t always match the text. Perhaps these minor shortcomings could be corrected in future printings, thereby enhancing the book’s usefulness as an encyclopedic reference work.
Despite its grim message, Rogue Prosecutors represents a welcome return to a conservative mainstay—law and order—following a short-lived flirtation by some center-right groups and figures with “criminal justice reform,” derided by critics as “soft on crime.” Sporting blurbs by former Attorney General Ed Meese, Andrew McCarthy, Heather Mac Donald, and the Manhattan Institute’s Rafael Mangual, the book is a devastating critique of Soros’ cynical plan to undermine public safety by financing the election of William Kunstler-style defense attorneys masquerading as prosecutors. It deserves to be widely read.
Friday, September 15, 2023
"The hour is indeed later than we would like to think."
Perhaps the author, Daniel J. Mahoney, had his own reasons for naming his essay, Refusing the "Great Refusal" but he could have used greater attention getters to provoke interest from a wider audience. After reading his thought provoking article I would have suggested one of his own one liners such as the following:
"The hour is indeed later than we would like to think."
This essay should be a 'must read' for those of us that can still read for it describes much of what's happening in real time without going back in time to find 'all' the root causes. Indeed Obama and the Clintons should have been mentioned for their efforts in destroying American culture. The Obamas for changing America's history and the Clintons removing traditional religious cultures and morals that were once considered sacred (on a personal note, I was appalled when the audience applauded at Hillary's speech to the World Women's Forum on this subject matter).
Less I wander too far off let's get on to why we are here today. If you have the means to do so, spread this essay far and wide for it's later than you think. - Norman E. Hooben
Refusing the “Great Refusal”
Woke despotism has not yet won the day. There is still time for resistance, reversal, and reclamation.
Editor’s Note – This essay was originally published at American Mind on September 6th, 2023.
To paraphrase Karl Marx, a specter is haunting the United States and the Western world more broadly: the specter of woke despotism. Most disturbingly, its epicenter is in the United States, a land once gloriously immune from the ideological and totalitarian temptations that so haunted and deformed European politics in the 20th century. As Christopher Rufo demonstrates in his indispensable new book, America’s Cultural Revolution, the woke revolution has been gaining traction for a very long time and is now on the cusp of “controlling everything,” from our universities and corporations to the prestige media to the increasingly censorious network of “social media” that stands in for civic discourse in the United States today.
The summer of 2020 brought the nihilistic face of this cultural revolution into the open by means of its frontal assault on what was left of the Old America. Statues of the great and good (among them Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, St. Junípero Serra, Teddy Roosevelt, and Quaker abolitionists) were toppled or defaced, as were those of men deemed hopelessly evil—foremost among them the Confederate generals who, while fighting for an unjust cause, often displayed impressive courage and personal integrity. Cities burned as radicals, much of the political class, and almost all the Democratic Party demanded the “defunding” of the police, an idea at once preposterous and profoundly immoral because of the harm it wreaks on the weak and vulnerable. The United States was denounced as “systematically racist,” as fundamentally unjust and indeed genocidal, and thus beyond political repair. Civic courage to confront this scandalous falsehood was in woefully short supply as intellectuals, journalists, and politicians competed to mouth revolutionary slogans worthy of the Jacobins and Bolsheviks, excusing violence and mayhem on a mass scale. Too many who knew better remained silent.
As a result, what I have called a “culture of hate” replaced what was left of the old civilities, and national self-loathing became morally obligatory. As Rufo powerfully illustrates, educated suburban women, corporate executives, and our colleges and universities (with only a few exceptions) succumbed to the “Great Refusal” originally heralded by the likes of Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, and the revolutionary New Left in the 1960s. The existing order, they had insisted, must be rejected root and branch in the name of “democratic communism,” an oxymoron if there ever was one. In the summer of 2020, tedious ideological clichés long ascendant on college campuses, such as the aforementioned “systematic racism,” “white supremacy,” “male supremacy,” “neocolonialism,” “genocidal capitalism,” and “heterosexism,” became current in the mainstream. The Great Refusal was underway in high gear.
Black Lives Matter, an insidious organization founded by militant “trained Marxists,” admirers of Mao and Che who denounced the bourgeois family and biblical religion in the shrillest terms, was celebrated by craven, self-hating elites. Ideological fanatics (and grifters) were massively funded by a corporate establishment trying to buy protection, one whose own political and cultural inclinations had already been warped by exposure to woke ideology during their college years. In a word, America’s collective nervous breakdown during the summer of 2020 was preceded by a 60-year “war of position,” theorized by Marxist Antonio Gramsci and famously described by student activist Rudi Dutschke as a “long march through the institutions.”
Douglass or Bell?
This “long march” of civic and intellectual subversion is richly and amply documented in Rufo’s book. We see how revolutionary agitprop took pedagogic form in the influential writings of the Brazilian activist Paulo Freire, whose writings paved the way for coercive “consciousness raising” in our schools and a frontal ideological assault on “Eurocentrist,” “white supremacist,” “heteropatriarchical,” and “homophobic” modes of thinking and discourse. The White Man, and Western civilization more broadly, became the Enemies par excellence. The bleak and angry nihilism of Derrick Bell and his students from Harvard Law School (who fanned out to teach at our leading universities and law schools) denied “people of color” any meaningful agency in a “system” that was monolithically repressive and racist to its core. These racially-obsessed activist-scholars willfully denied the significant progress in race relations and racial justice in the United States that was there for all to see. In doing so, they helped poison civic and intellectual life, sowing hatred and suspicion instead of mutual respect and mutual accountability.
the very fact that nothing constructive or enduring can be sustained by the seething resentment, anger, and repudiation that it so recklessly promotes.
Let me now offer some advice for salvaging and renewing the spirit of American republicanism. In general, it is predicated on the thought articulated so well by George Orwell concerning the necessary hygiene of language. Ideology always seeks to commandeer and command language, to twist its meaning for its own perfidious purposes.
Therefore, those who love our principles of justice—equality of rights, equality under the law, merit and responsibility—must not be taken in by the alluring homonyms that give old and precious words radically new and pernicious meanings. As John O’Sullivan has written, those homonyms subvert “liberal democracy as it was understood by, say, Winston Churchill or FDR or John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan.” This counterfeit version of liberal democracy “is not really open to institutions and policies that run counter to is ‘liberationist’ instincts.” It thus grows ever more hostile to fundamental freedoms in the name of “social justice,” “equity,” and a conception of “democracy” that runs roughshod over the self-government of a free people.
As endlessly evoked by woke ideologues, “social justice” has nothing to do with equal rights, equal opportunity, or the recognition of a common human dignity. “Social justice warriors” are not interested in the careful weighing and balancing of the rival claims of the rich, poor, and everyone in-between. Instead, they wish to tear down, to level, to “equalize” in a way that necessitates the harshest tyranny. Truth be told, that ubiquitous phrase from the summer of 2020—“Black Lives Matter”—had nothing decent, humane, or universalist about it. In Orwellian fashion, the phrase meant to convey that only some black lives mattered—black lives that could be weaponized, but not those murdered in Seattle’s occupied CHAZ zone. Nor those of the victims who died as a direct result of “defunding the police,” nor those who die every weekend in the murderous gang-laden slums of Chicago. A movement that forbids us on pain of cancellation from proclaiming the noble principle, inseparably biblical and American, that “All lives matter,” is insidious through and through.
Likewise, the increasingly obligatory alphabetical agitprop must be resisted and challenged. These include DEI—the insidious acronym that justifies the new tyranny of coerced and bureaucratically-imposed slogans, doctrines, and programs required by Critical Race Theory. They include also our new LGBTQIA++ regime, unremitting in its obsession with “queerness,” “transgenderism,” and sexual “fluidity.” Again in classically Orwellian fashion, “diversity” demands absolute ideological uniformity. Blacks and women, and gays for that matter, who think independently or challenge the new “fissionism” (as the sociologist Peter Baehr calls it), which denies any normative sexual differences rooted in biological nature between men and women, are relegated to the category of traitors to their race and gender.
Similarly, the once noble word “equity” has been distorted beyond all recognition. No longer connoting fairness, balance, an effort to adjust a discrepancy, or an exception not covered by the letter of the law (as in Aristotle’s Ethics or the Anglo-American common law tradition), it now demands a perfect equality of outcomes for every race or ethnic group. As the journalist Barton Swaim has put it, progressives who invoke this ideological reinvention of equity “believe…against all evidence, that any variance in success among individuals of different races must be the result of conscious or unconscious racism.” So understood, “equity” wars with human nature, and would require draconian tyranny if it were to be truly applied in practice. It has also led to patently unfair results—witness the quotas that minimize admissions for Jews and Asians in elite institutions. Nothing good can result from equity so construed except injustice, tyranny, and racial and social conflict, a new “war of all against all.”
“Inclusion” is equally dishonest and also insidiously Orwellian: Those who believe in the color-blind constitution, who do not loathe their country, and who believe in the old verities and morality are not welcome in the woke university, law firm, corporation, or media outlet. The woke “community” is in truth as exclusionary as it gets. More broadly, DEI is a classic example of what the anti-totalitarian dissidents behind the Iron Curtain in the days before 1989 called the “ideological Lie.” Every letter and word in their political nomenclature is a lie. Those who choose to live in its fictive “Second Reality” quickly lose contact with the most elementary realities. In the end, they risk losing the capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood, good from evil, to see what even an open-eyed child can see.
No Compromise, No Surrender
This brings me to the final and most essential point. Every decent American must reject the quintessentially ideological move of locating evil exclusively in suspect groups who are said to be guilty for who they are and not what they have done. That was tried by the Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and Nazis with murderous consequences. Nor are some racial or “gender” categories composed exclusively of “innocent victims” bereft of sin and any capacity for wrongdoing. We are all capable of being “victims and executioners,” as Albert Camus reminded us after the Second World War.
In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spoke liberating truth when he wrote that “the line between good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.” That is the path of moral sanity and political decency recommended by both the Christian Solzhenitsyn and the unbelieving Camus. To believe otherwise is to utterly falsify the human condition and to succumb to ideology and fanaticism.
Thus the ideological Lie in its new woke instantiation must be rejected as the crucial first step toward overcoming the aspiring despotism of our woke tyrants. We do not yet face a full-scale totalitarian or ideological state, but the logic of totalitarianism has been institutionalized throughout government as well as civil society. The hour is indeed later than we would like to think. In this new situation, we must resist—courageously and self-consciously—a cruelly censorious cancel culture and the intoxication of brutal Twitter mobs. We must resist, but not emulate. We must not partake of or repeat racialist lies (whether by the dwindling band of old-fashioned racists or from the more pernicious and numerous new ideological ones) or repeat ideological lies we know to be false and destructive.
We cannot become Havel’s “Greengrocerers” who unthinkingly mimic ideological clichés. To be sure, we are not required to scream the truth in the city square on a daily basis. Prudence and even elemental common sense must dictate how we exercise our civic and moral integrity. But civic courage, and no small dose of Churchillian fortitude, is today a prerequisite for moral and civic recovery, for winning our country back from the ideologues who so disdain it.
Rufo is right: our real choice is to be thoughtful, principled, and spirited “counterrevolutionaries.” We must not fight black racialism with an equally misguided white identity politics. Instead, we must take our stand with the principles of ’76, the majestic courage of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, the Christian gentlemanliness of Robert Woodson, who rightly insists that “1776 Unites,” and the concern for stubborn facts that animates the great black social scientist Thomas Sowell, who rightly teaches that disparities are not coextensive with discrimination.
As this litany indicates, our attachment to 1776 and everything it represents cannot be simple-minded or naïve—we must renew the wisdom of our forebears in light of the challenge of a thoroughgoing nihilism they could hardly have imagined. In this vein, we must recognize and acknowledge that we are more than a “propositional nation,” even if we are a nation that should remain dedicated to noble “self-evident truths.” We are also a territorial democracy, with a history that is uniquely our own and with borders that demarcate us as a self-governing nation. As the political scientist Carson Holloway recently observed, in recent decades “Marriage has been redefined, public education has been used to indoctrinate the young in radical sexual ideologies, and religion has been marginalized—all while propositional-nation conservatives have been unaware that the nation’s character has been marginalized.” That will not do.
One final note. In refusing to bow before woke ideology, especially the madness of gender ideology which wars against God’s creation and the natural order of things, there is no better path to follow than to reaffirm the oldest and deepest truth, the bedrock truth of all political order and moral good sense: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).
A serious conversation, lively and respectful, must be inaugurated among all those who wish to preserve moral and political sanity in our country today, a true coalition of the brave. In doing so, we must remain at once spirited and moderate, conservative and counterrevolutionary, manly and humane. At the same time, we must not confuse high prudence and genuine moderation, always to be cherished, with the “false reptile courage” that Edmund Burke warned against among false friends of liberty who refused to stand up to the “armed doctrine” of Jacobinism in his own time. There is in truth no middle way between the Great Affirmation and the Great Refusal. Our work is all the more difficult since this self-hating Refusal has now more or less become public orthodoxy. But the battle can and must be fought and won.
Tuesday, September 12, 2023
NEW HAMPSHIRE YOU'RE NOT ALONE
Pick a random voting machine and let's see what happens...in any state. The ENTIRE system is corrupt!
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