In the future, everyone will be tough on crime for fifteen minutes
Some people are all in favor of criminal justice reform, unless the case is different because it makes them mad.
Michael Tracey is one of these writers, like Glenn Greenwald or Rod Dreher, who is absolutely catastrophically wrong when he’s wrong, but fist-pumpingly right when he’s right. And his take on the overturning of Bill Cosby’s criminal conviction, and his reaction to same from those who normally profess to be liberal criminal-justice reformers, is absolutely on point:
Courts don't “exonerate” criminal defendants or declare them "innocent" — they adjudicate whether the legal standards of guilt can be established in accordance with the due process protections set forth by the Constitution. You don’t need to have gone to law school to understand this basic concept. And yet, there’s an endless stream of people with high-profile media positions who apparently have no compunction about revealing their inability to grasp an elemental aspect of how the US government works.
When social media commentators, headline writers, and TV reporters scornfully dismiss the overturning of Bill Cosby’s sexual assault convictions as having hinged on a mere “technicality,” they are demonstrating one or more of the following: they did not bother to read the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling, they have an extremely poor understanding of the foundational precepts of American law, or they are so addled by their uncontrollable emotional fervor they can barely formulate a coherent thought. Because the Court was emphatic: it ruled that the prosecution of Cosby was “an affront to fundamental fairness” and “antithetical to... the integrity and functionality of the criminal justice system.” That’s hardly consistent with what most people think of when they hear the term “technicality,” as though Cosby lucked out and got off on some minor oversight or procedural snafu. Wrong. According to the Court, the entire basis for his prosecution was a wholly untenable violation of his civil liberties.
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…for left/liberal media campaigners who just spent a year spouting abolitionist slogans about the depredations of the criminal justice system, and style themselves ideologically opposed to US carceral power, the inability to grasp the existence of contradictions in this attitude is really just amazing. What their attitude boils down to is this: civil liberties are irrelevant, basic fairness in prosecutorial conduct is irrelevant, and a geriatric Bill Cosby should be in prison because he’s the object of a social movement’s moral opprobrium. In an irony that few will ever appreciate, this is essentially the exact same logic which caused the US to become the most bloated prison state on earth.
As I mentioned to one of the nation’s leading #MeToo activists, actress person Amber Tamblyn, she and so many like-minded “influencers” should really consider rebranding as pro-incarceration activists. Because that’s the inescapable outcome of the “change” to the justice system they seem to be calling for — greater leeway for cops and prosecutors to put people in prison, and keep them locked up. That’s just what it is. You can dress it up in whatever kind of highfalutin, socially-conscious language you want, but the inextricable policy result of the “change” you are demanding is obvious for anyone to see — if they can manage to momentarily dial down the emotional outrage meter. And it’s entirely inconsistent with any claimed fidelity to civil liberties.
Why is any of this important? Not because Bill Cosby specifically is owed some sort of impassioned public rehabilitation. Anyone is free to form their own judgments about Cosby’s behavior based on what’s in the public record.
The importance of the Cosby episode lies in how it once again elucidates the endlessly conflicting impulses at the heart of contemporary left-liberalism, which is becoming something of a theme on this Substack. The point is not to take easy pot-shots at hypocrisy: that’s trivial. Who ultimately cares if some dopey Twitter comedian doesn’t have perfectly consistent political views? What’s important to recognize is that these paradoxes are evidence of the durability of contemporary left-liberalism. Media activists can “brand” as dedicated opponents of an overly-punitive and overly-carceral criminal justice system, then turn around and agitate for the carceral power of the state to be deployed on behalf of their social priorities — and hardly anyone perceives an issue. Why? Because contemporary left-liberalism is possessed of a wondrous flexibility that enables it to latch onto multiple strands of seemingly contradictory public passion all at once, and gloss right over the ensuing tensions — in furtherance of solidifying its grip on the Democratic Party, cultural organs, and the countless other institutions that conservatives are always complaining the Left controls.
A recent episode of the Fifth Column podcast goes into similar territory regarding the reaction to Derek Chauvin’s sentence for the murder of George Floyd. As Michael Moynihan points out, Chauvin’s sentence for one murder is just longer than the sentence Anders Breivik received for 77 murders in Norway - and he will serve his time in much better conditions, to boot.
And yet, the Venn Diagram for people who say the United States should be more like Scandinavia, and those who say Chauvin deserved the maximum sentence available, has a lot of overlap.
We all know right-wingers want to lock ‘em all up and throw away the key for anything more than a really minor prank or inconvenience like (checks notes) invading the Capitol Building in a half-assed attempt to overturn the results of a democratic election. Conservatives are supposed to be the tough-on-crime people.
But when a case pushes certain buttons involving gender, race or sexuality, those on the progressive side show just how serious they are about their reformist - or, in some cases, radical - credentials. As the Beer Belly Putschists’ cases start making their way through the criminal Justice system, some of the relatively minor participants will undoubtedly be given no more than probation, and I guarantee you we’ll see a lot of online outrage that they weren’t automatically sent to the same prisons they want to abolish.
Much as been written about right-wing media and evangelical churches leading people down the conspiracy rabbit hole, but the Los Angeles Times reports on another gateway to the Q-niverse: the “wellness” community.
It seemed like the end of a typical reiki attunement: A group of women wearing yoga pants and flowing floral skirts, gathered in a healer’s home after a course in the alternative therapy of balancing chakras, clearing auras and transferring energy.
But it was the early days of the pandemic and COVID-19 was spreading fast. The women in the room stood so close that their bodies touched. No one wore masks.
Kathleen Abraham, 61, saw that the Facebook photo of the group had been taken in the Orange County home of one of her dearest friends, a woman she had known for 15 years who had helped her recover from breast cancer and introduced her to the world of New Age spiritualism.
Weeks later came another jolt. Her friend announced on Instagram that she had been red-pilled, a term used by QAnon adherents to describe their conversion to belief in the conspiracy. Another old friend, Abraham’s first reiki master, was also growing more extreme, writing that the COVID-19 pandemic was a conspiracy and face masks were toxic.
QAnon’s conspiratorial belief system has now pulled in at least a dozen people in Abraham’s spiritual social circle, including two of her closest friends and two friendly psychics who always claimed the booth next to hers at New Age trade shows.
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More commonly associated with right-wing groups, the conspiracy theory is spreading through yoga, meditation and other wellness circles. Friends and colleagues have watched with alarm as Instagram influencers and their New Age peers — yogis, energy healers, sound bathers, crystal practitioners, psychics, quantum magicians — embraced QAnon’s conspiratorial worldview and sprayed it across social media.
The health, wellness and spirituality world has always been primed for that worldview, followers say. Though largely filled with well-meaning people seeking spiritual or physical comfort, the $1.5-trillion industry can also be a hotbed for conspiracies, magical thinking, dietary supplements with dubious scientific claims and distrust of institutional healthcare, including vaccines.
“It’s always been the water we were swimming in,” said Julian Walker, 50, a Mar Vista yogi, ecstatic dance teacher and co-host of the “Conspirituality” podcast, which tracks the marriage of conspiracy theories and spiritualism. “Now we’re seeing what happens when the water rises.”
Look who’s turned up on Gaia, a streaming service specializing in “New Age” programming:
Icke, of course, is the British conspiracy theorist who makes Alex Jones look like George Will. He’s most famous for his assertion that the world is actually controlled by shape-shifting lizards in human form and/or a cabal run by…oh, take a wild guess:
Icke’s 1995 book, “And the Truth Shall Set You Free,” focused on a global conspiracy by “Rothschilds and Rockefellers” and contained a chapter questioning aspects of the Holocaust and criticizing society for suppressing “alternative information to the official line of the Second World War.”
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A former professional soccer player, Icke worked for the BBC as a sports broadcaster before leaving in 1990.
He has since become known as a conspiracy theorist, and has been slammed by anti-discrimination groups, who say he holds dangerous views about the world being secretly controlled by an elite Jewish group and that Jews bankrolled Hitler.
As a wise man wrote just last week, conspiracy theories are a gateway drug for antisemitism. For more evidence, check out what the “time for some game theory” guy has been up to lately:
And now, some bonus antisemitism from another charming fellow:
Not gonna lie, I rejoined Twitter in no small part because of @Super70sSports.