Guest Post by Kurt Schlichter
Conservatives, being conservative, like to think they live in an ordered world with norms and rules and that if they rely upon the norms and rules, they will be protected. They won’t be. The genius of cultural Marxism is how it attacks those foundational premises that conservatives believe in, perverts them, and then uses them as a suppository on the befuddled cons.
Let’s look at the phenomenon of the Soros DAs. Why did the leftist zillionaire decide to spend a ton of money in otherwise obscure local races? Because he found a weakness in the American political system and decided to exploit it knowing that dumb conservatives would be slow to understand how his actions destroyed the system and keep acting as if the old system was still in effect long after it had been demolished. Here’s how it works.
District attorneys, and other prosecutors, have incredible discretion to charge or not charge crimes. In normal times, this was not a problem, because while a prosecutor position was typically an elected office, it was not a political position in the usual sense. Republican, Democrat, whatever – the DAs usually prosecuted bad guys relatively fairly and squarely. Sure, sometimes they got stupid and went after enemies, but generally they were not partisan. My mom became an assistant DA in San Mateo County in the 1970s. She went in to meet the DA, Keith Sorenson, a legendary prosecutor.
He told her that her job was not to convict people but to do justice, and that he expected her not to prosecute cases where the result would be unjust or the case could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. To this day, I cannot tell you if Keith Sorenson was a Democrat or a Republican, and it did not matter. He ran his office like it should be run. Most DAs did – that was why prosecutor offices were once respected institutions. That was why it was safe to give prosecutors massive discretion. We could rely on them to do their duty.
But what if Keith Sorenson was a communist catspaw?
Instead of enforcing the law, the Austin Soros DA – like Alvin Bragg, George Gascon, that idiot in Atlanta, and so many other scumbags seeded in blue cities across the map – decided that he would choose not to prosecute crimes that the legislature enacted laws against, not on the grounds that the individuals were innocent but on the grounds that the Soros serf did not like the law the people’s representatives had enacted. They protected regular criminals, and they especially protected Democrat agents who rioted and looted, making it possible for Democrats to use violence to achieve their goals.
And they decided they would, unlike typical felonies, go full throttle on shaky and legally dubious cases against political opponents (like Trump) and those exercising the (leftist-disfavored) right to self-defense. They took that broad, unfettered discretion DAs had been entrusted with and used it in the service of cultural Marxism instead of the people.
And now we have the sham system of today. But dumb cons cannot comprehend that systems only function if all the cogs are working correctly. If one component is flawed – like a leftist DA pursuing a specific agenda – you stop having a system. But dumb cons do not want to accept that the justice system has been corrupted so that there is no justice system anymore. They seek the false comfort of illusory normalcy so they do not have to face the ugly reality.
Get it through your thick squish heads – there is no justice system to preserve or protect anymore. That’s why you look at a sham prosecution like Daniel Perry in the blue enclave of Austin and you do NOT shrug and say, “Oh well, the jury has spoken.” That is the normalcy bias – you cannot assume this is normal because the presence of a leftist DA pursing a leftist agenda destroys the system.
The great @IowaHawk, before he got totally disgusted with politics and began tweeting primarily about old cars, called it with a tweet made famous by PJ Media’s own Instapundit Glenn Reynolds. He tweeted:
1. Identify a respected institution.
2. kill it.
3. gut it.
4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.
#lefties
The city and county district attorneys’ offices were once respected institutions, not perfect but generally trusted enough to be given a huge level of discretion. Then Soros saw their unfettered discretion and identified the system’s vulnerability. The Soros candidates jumped into the normally low-energy races with millions from their patron and won them. Next, they proceeded to kill and gut the institution by politicizing it. They then wore its pelt pretending that nothing had changed and that they were still entitled to the same respect and deference the non-political prosecutors enjoyed. And stupid conservatives nodded along.
You owe these institutions no respect because they are not the institutions that had once been worthy of respect. They are a simulacrum of the old institutions, a fraud, a scam, a clever ploy to get people who default to assuming everything is normal to go along when everything is not normal. And the left counted on that normalcy bias to defeat any resistance.
But some of us know what time it is. Governor Ron DeSantis gets it. He fired a Soros DA and passed laws to limit the ability of pinkos to perpetrate their violence. Governor Greg Abbott promised to pardon Daniel Perry, rejecting the notion that we are obligated to pretend that a Soros DA’s actions have any legitimacy at all. And Jim Jordan is going to investigate that slob Alvin Bragg. Republicans in Congress investigating a DA in a Democrat city? Why, that’s against all the norms! No, it’s not, because the norms only apply when you do not have nakedly partisan prosecutors using their power to interfere in national elections. Change the system by changing a component, and you change the rules. You don’t get to defend your rejection of normalcy by demanding that we pretend that everything is normal.
This is the way.
Understand what has changed and stop pretending it has not changed because you really wish everything was normal and you think that if you shut your eyes and pretend hard enough, it will all be normal again. Soros found a loophole – prosecutorial professionalism that meant we trusted prosecutors with expansive powers. Well, we need to fix that. In every red state there are blue cities where this crap happens. Time to rein these communists in. In red states, we have the power of the state, and we can take the power the left exploits away from the leftists and retain it for ourselves to protect the citizens who are being plagued by unpunished crime and threatened by unfair political prosecutions. Red states must:
Invest red governors with the power to remove DAs who refuse to do their job.
Pass broad laws that expand and protect the right to self-defense, like presuming it exists where mobs exist or when the citizen is trapped in his vehicle.
Create procedural protections, like the threshold motions to dismiss already available in some states, that force the prosecutor to present actual evidence that could potentially be believed beyond a reasonable doubt before the prosecutor can proceed to trial where there is a claim of self-defense
Create penalties and incentives to force DAs back to their proper role, like forcing city/county governments to pay not only attorney’s fees but damages to citizens who successfully assert a self-defense defense.
Expand pardon powers for red governors – too many states force them into complicated administration proceedings before they can issue pardons, and the people can pass judgment on the red state governors’ use of the power at the ballot box
And the most important thing – red state leaders and our GOP pols in the federal government must understand and accept that this situation is not normal, and that different realities call for different measures. Thirty years ago, our prosecutors could generally be trusted to do something like the right thing, but thanks to Soros’s exploitation of that trust, we cannot say that today. We Republicans need to stop pretending that everything is normal. It’s not.