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Posts Tagged ‘Trayvon Martin’

A Flawed Impeachment for ‘Incitement’ | Chronicles

Posted by M. C. on January 15, 2021

Mr. Lee gave the crowd Zimmerman’s address—it was erroneous, but that is beside the point—and tweeted several times urging people to “Kill that *,” and similar statements.

But let us set that aside for a moment and use this episode to engage in a philosophical analysis of the law regarding incitement. “Incitement” is pretty much on everyone’s lips, Democrat as well as Republican, friend or enemy of Mr. Trump’s, so this gives a golden opportunity to reflect upon the libertarian analysis of incitement, and why it should not be considered a crime. 

The difficulty with incitement comes over the issue of free will. Murray N. Rothbard said it best when he wrote:

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/blog/a-flawed-impeachment-for–incitement-/

By Walter Block

President Donald Trump was hastily impeached by the House for a second time on Wednesday for “inciting insurrection.” 

Legislators accused Trump of egging on, instigating, and inciting his supporters to engage in insurrection and overthrow the U.S. government, starting with a violent attack on Congress. Uttering phrases such as, “You will never take back our country with weakness,” during his speech on Jan 6, 2021, Trump encouraged his supporters “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard” at the Capitol building. 

There are major factual errors in the House’s decision. We know now that the riots started well before Trump’s speech ended, so it’s wrong to strongly or even weakly imply that the subsequent events were a reaction to his speech. Furthermore, after the impeachment Wednesday, CNN reported that the FBI is examining evidence that the attack on the U.S. Capitol was planned, with the rioters stashing equipment in advance. 

Thus, it is not at all clear that Trump anticipated the actions of the rioters, let alone supported them. Rather, the goal of his speech was to attain an electoral college victory. How so? By demanding that electors from enough Biden states be rejected by Mike Pence in particular, in his role as Vice President, and by Congress in general. It was his last-ditch effort to make the case that Congress should overturn an election that he, along with many others, thought improper. If read carefully, Trump’s Jan. 6 speech will not offer a scintilla of evidence that he incited anyone. 

In retrospect, however, the speech and rally appear unwise, for several reasons. First, he lost the support of such virtue-signaling members of his Administration as Betsy DeVos, William Barr, Mick Mulvaney, Matt Pottinger, Ryan Tully, Stephanie Grisham, and Sarah Matthews. It also gave the likes of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi an opening to attack him. 

As a supporter of President Trump, do I regret that he gave that speech? Yes. Not because of the discourse—which was excellent—but because of the “hay” his enemies were able to make of it. Schumer and Pelosi are deliriously happy that Trump spoke out as he did on this occasion; therefore, I am not.

But let us set that aside for a moment and use this episode to engage in a philosophical analysis of the law regarding incitement. “Incitement” is pretty much on everyone’s lips, Democrat as well as Republican, friend or enemy of Mr. Trump’s, so this gives a golden opportunity to reflect upon the libertarian analysis of incitement, and why it should not be considered a crime. 

The difficulty with incitement comes over the issue of free will. Murray N. Rothbard said it best when he wrote:

Should it be illegal …. to ‘incite to riot’? Suppose that Green exhorts a crowd: ‘Go! Burn! Loot! Kill!’ and the mob proceeds to do just that, with Green having nothing further to do with these criminal activities. Since every man is free to adopt or not adopt any course of action he wishes, we cannot say that in some way Green determined the members of the mob to their criminal activities; we cannot make him, because of his exhortation, at all responsible for their crimes. ‘Inciting to riot,’ therefore, is a pure exercise of a man’s right to speak without being thereby implicated in crime. On the other hand, it is obvious that if Green happened to be involved in a plan or conspiracy with others to commit various crimes, and that then Green told them to proceed, he would then be just as implicated in the crimes as are the others—more so, if he were the mastermind who headed the criminal gang. This is a seemingly subtle distinction which in practice is clearcut—there is a world of difference between the head of a criminal gang and a soap-box orator during a riot; the former is not, properly to be charged simply with ‘incitement.’

In sharp contrast, when filmmaker Spike Lee was incensed at George Zimmerman for his killing of Trayvon Martin, he was not guilty of mere incitement. Mr. Lee was, instead, guilty of actively aiding and abetting the crowd to go and attack Zimmerman, who was later exonerated for his act of self-defense. Mr. Lee gave the crowd Zimmerman’s address—it was erroneous, but that is beside the point—and tweeted several times urging people to “Kill that *****,” and similar statements.

We have a continuum issue here. Lee, who went out of his way to help bring about mob violence, behaved culpably under libertarian law. The person who simply advocates violence does not. The key distinction is that Mr. Lee aided the mob by providing (though erroneous) an address for Mr. Zimmerman. Mr. Trump did no such thing. Lee did not merely incite. He aided and abetted the mob. 

All of this is philosophical, of course: by any standard, President Trump did not incite the mob on Jan. 6, let alone aid and abet them.

P.S. Does anyone notice the wildly different treatment of this right-wing riot compared to the much more devastating ones put on by left-wing “peaceful” marches and mayhems organized by BLM and Antifa? I don’t think it is politically correct to even mention this disparity. So, fughedaboudit, as we say in Brooklyn. 

P.P.S. Is it possible that there was a false flag operation in effect here? That BLM and Antifa snuck into the confused melee, with the goal of undermining President Trump’s authority? Enquiring minds want to know.

(Correction: The 10th paragraph of an earlier version of this article incorrectly spelled Trayvon Martin’s first name without a “y.”)

Walter Block

Walter Block is an economics professor at Loyola University and a Mises Institute senior fellow. He is author or several books, including Defending the Undefendable (1976). 

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That Change You Requested…? – Kunstler

Posted by M. C. on June 2, 2020

Hungry for change? You won’t have to wait long. This society may be unrecognizable in a few months. For one thing, there’s a good chance that the current violence in the streets won’t blow over as it has before.

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/that-change-you-requested/

James Howard Kunstler

All the previous incidents of white cops killing blacks were just too ambiguous to seal the deal. Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri (a murky business); Tamir Rice in Cleveland (waving the BB gun that looked like a .45 automatic); Trayvon Martin (his killer George Zimmerman was not a cop and was not “white”); Eric Garner, Staten Island (black policewoman sergeant on the scene didn’t stop it); Philando Castile, Minneapolis (the cop was Hispanic and the vic had a gun). Even the recent February killing of jogger Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia, had some sketchy elements (did Arbery try to seize the shotgun?) — YouTube has scrubbed the video (?) — and then it took months for the two white suspects (not cops) to be arrested.

The George Floyd killing had none of those weaknesses. Plus, the video presented a pretty much universal image of oppression: a man with his knee on another man’s neck. Didn’t that say it all?  You didn’t need a Bob Dylan song to explain it. The Minneapolis police dithered for four days before charging policeman Derek Chauvin with Murder 3 (unpremeditated, but with reckless disregard for human life). The three other cops on the scene who stupidly stood by doing nothing have yet to be charged. Cut it, print it, and cue the mobs.

The nation was already reeling from the weird twelve-week Covid-19 lockdown of everyday life and the economic havoc it brought to careers, businesses, and incomes. In Minnesota, the stay-at-home order was just lifted on May 17, but bars and restaurants were still closed until June. Memorial Day, May 25, was one of the first really balmy days of mid-spring, 78 degrees. People were out-and-about, perhaps even feeling frisky after weeks of dreary seclusion. So, once the video of George Floyd’s death got out, the script was set: take it to the streets!

Few Americans were unsympathetic to the protest marches that followed. Remorse, censure, and tears flowed from every official portal, from the mouth and eyes of every political figure in the land. The tableau of Officer Chauvin’s knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck was readymade for statuary. Indeed, there are probably dozens of statues extant in the world of just such a scene expressing one people’s oppression over another. And yet the public sentiments early-on after the George Floyd killing had a stale, ceremonial flavor: The people demand change! End systemic racism! No justice, no peace! How many times have we seen this movie?

What is changing — and suddenly — is that now it’s not just black people who struggle to thrive in the USA, but everybody else of any ethnic group who is not a hedge fund veep, an employee of BlackRock Financial, or a K-Street lobbyist — and even those privileged characters may find themselves in reduced circumstances before long. The prospects of young adults look grimmest of all. They face an economy so disordered that hardly anyone can find something to do that pays enough to support the basics of life, on top of being swindled by the false promises of higher education and the money-lending racket that animates it.

So, it’s not surprising that, when night falls, the demons come out. Things get smashed up and burned down. And all that after being cooped up for weeks on end in the name of an illness that mostly kills people in nursing homes. Ugly as the ANTIFA movement is, it’s exactly what you get when young people realize their future has been stolen from them. Or, more literally, when they are idle and broke and see fabulous wealth all around them in the banks’ glass skyscrapers, and the car showrooms, and the pageants of celebrity fame and fortune on the boob tube. They are extras in a new movie called The Fourth Turning Meets the Long Emergency but they may not know it.

Hungry for change? You won’t have to wait long. This society may be unrecognizable in a few months. For one thing, there’s a good chance that the current violence in the streets won’t blow over as it has before. There hasn’t been such sudden, massive unemployment before, not even in the Great Depression — and we’re not even the same country that went through that rough episode. Just about every arrangement in contemporary life is on-the-rocks one way or another. Big business, small business, show business… it’s all cratering. The great big secret behind all that is not that capitalism failed; it’s that the capital in capitalism isn’t really there anymore, at least not in the amounts that mere appearances like stock valuations suggest. We squandered it, and now our institutions are straining mightily to pretend that “printing” money is the same as capital. (It’s just more debt.) Note, the stock markets are up this morning at the open! Go figure….

Change? We’re getting it good and hard, and not at a rate we were prepared for. It’s hugely disorienting. It produces friction, heat, and light, which easily becomes violence. There’s, for sure, plenty we can do to make new arrangements for American life without becoming communists or Nazis, but a lot of activities have to fail before we see how that could work. The overburden of obsolete complexity is crushing us, like Derek Chauvin’s knee on George Floyd’s neck. They were both, in their way, common men, caught in the maelstrom of metaphor. That proverbial long, hot summer we’ve heard about for so long…? It’s here.

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Racial Revenge? – Taki’s Magazine

Posted by M. C. on May 14, 2020

Since he doesn’t read much, Trump tends to avoid the bizarre intellectual dead ends that verbalists get themselves wedged into. For instance, Hillary Clinton invited the would-be Ferguson cop killer’s mom onto the stage at the Democratic National Convention: an insanely self-defeating ploy, but one that seemed like common sense to Establishment figures such as Hillary who had been reading (and, worse, believing) The New York Times throughout the Great Awokening.

But controlling the media means that you also don’t learn from your mistakes.

https://www.takimag.com/article/racial-revenge/

Last Friday, the day after two whites in Georgia were arrested in the vastly publicized killing of the black jogger/prowler Ahmaud Arbery, a young black gunman murdered two octogenarian whites, Paul and Lidia Marino, while they were visiting their son’s grave at a veterans’ cemetery in Delaware. After a six-hour firefight with the police, the shooter, a 29-year-old black man, was dead—whether at police hands or his own remains unknown.

In contrast to Arbery’s killing, this second interracial killing case has gotten virtually zero national media attention through Tuesday morning, even though it’s fairly spectacular in scale and quite curious in motive. For example, an eyewitness speculated that the killer appeared to have brought extra ammunition for his planned shoot-out to the death with the police.

The cops don’t have an explanation for the killer’s actions yet. It wasn’t a robbery. It doesn’t sound like a contract killing. (I can’t rule that out, but I did check if the victims, a retired lithographer and a housewife, were close relatives of any mafioso of the same surname, but found zero connections.) It could be some kind of personal beef, but nobody has found a connection between the killer and the killed at this point.

No confession note, social media, or interviews with the shooter’s family have yet emerged to explain his motivations. Although, to be frank, the press doesn’t seem to be all that motivated to get to the bottom of this seemingly random slaughter. There isn’t even much talk about what kind of weapon the killer used, in contrast to the gun porn after similar mass shootings.

Imagine that the circumstances were reversed and if on Friday a young white man had hunted down an elderly black couple visiting their son’s grave at a veterans’ cemetery.

“What happens when it’s The Megaphone itself that may have egged on the killer?”

The national media would be in full cry over this racist atrocity. President Trump would attend the funeral. The prestige press would demand that whatever web sources of information and opinion the gunman had followed should be, First Amendment or not, permanently exterminated.

But what happens when it’s The Megaphone itself that may have egged on the killer? For example, a search of the New York Times archives finds 104 articles mentioning the name of Ahmaud Arbery so far just in the month of May. That’s even more saturation coverage than the Times normally devotes to late-breaking developments in the Emmett Till case.

The possibility that the cemetery killer was inspired to shoot some random whites by the enormous media hoopla over the still-ambiguous death of Arbery is not something that the prestige press is rushing to look into. We are never supposed to consider whether The Establishment getting all hyped up over the shooting of blacks by whites (or by nonwhites in the case of Trayvon Martin and Philando Castile) might inspire other blacks to shoot whites.

In contrast, the shooting by a homely white in Georgia of handsome young black criminal Ahmaud Arbery immediately after Arbery chased him down and punched him in the head while grappling for his gun has been promoted into an enormous story by the prestige press, because, after all, when has Black Twitter ever led the media astray? If you can’t trust Black Twitter for a disinterested, objective evaluation of a complex, fast-happening event, who can you trust?

I mean besides in the Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray cases… Sure, the media falling mindlessly for the various Black Lives Matter fiascos was central to the national homicide rate leaping a record 24.8% from 2014 to 2016 and perhaps getting Trump elected president. But it’s racist to know those facts.

It turns out that there is much security video of Arbery, who was arrested for bringing a gun to a high school basketball game and for stealing a TV from Walmart, engaged in what looks like casing the joint for a burglary.

But the subsequent Delaware shooting is of no interest to the press. The concept that some blacks might take seriously press incitements about how they should hate whites simply doesn’t exist. The text string “Black Lives Matter terrorism” has almost never appeared in the news media, even though there have been multiple high-profile assassinations carried out by BLM supporters.

For example, after the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island in 2014, a Black Lives Matter advocate murdered two NYPD officers in retribution for the deaths of Garner and Michael Brown of Ferguson, as the killer explained on Instagram.

The most lurid Black Lives Matter terrorist attack occurred on July 8, 2016, soon after President Obama’s speech from Poland denouncing police bias against blacks following the shootings of Castile and Alton Sterling. Obama cited numerous tendentious statistics to encourage blacks to feel that their problems are the fault of white people, the way Obama always blamed his speeding tickets on racist cops. The ex-president, who is not really a math person, summed up:

So that if you add it all up, the African-American and Hispanic population, who make up only 30 percent of the general population, make up more than half of the incarcerated population.

Now, these are facts.

Sure, but what fraction of crimes do they commit? The Obama Administration’s own Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in 2011 that from 1980 to 2008, blacks alone made up 52 percent of homicide offenders, despite being only about 13 percent of the population.

Not surprisingly, a Black Lives Matter enthusiast soon shot fourteen cops in Dallas, murdering five. A week later, three more cops were slain in Baton Rouge.

This may have been a key turning point in the history of the last decade because it helped propel Donald Trump into the White House by demonstrating that the Democrats were encouraging cop killers.

Since he doesn’t read much, Trump tends to avoid the bizarre intellectual dead ends that verbalists get themselves wedged into. For instance, Hillary Clinton invited the would-be Ferguson cop killer’s mom onto the stage at the Democratic National Convention: an insanely self-defeating ploy, but one that seemed like common sense to Establishment figures such as Hillary who had been reading (and, worse, believing) The New York Times throughout the Great Awokening.

If your Party controls the media, you can have all these unfortunate events memory-holed, so that you never get confronted with tiresome questions about just how much blood you have on your hands in the murders of elders visiting their son’s grave.

But controlling the media means that you also don’t learn from your mistakes.

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Will the Miami Herald Step Up and Save Mainstream Journalism?

Posted by M. C. on October 28, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/10/will_the_miami_herald_step_up_and_save_mainstream_journalism.html

By Jack Cashill

As intended, my October 23 article, “Why Did the Miami Herald Abandon Journalism,” caught the attention of the editors of that venerable newspaper.

Now that I have their attention, I would like them to address a question that only they have the clout and resources to answer: did the Florida state attorneys know that their star witness in the 2013 trial of George Zimmerman was an imposter?

If the editors answer this question, they could win a Pulitzer. Even if they fall short, a good faith effort could help restore the faltering faith of many Americans in mainstream American journalism. Here is what we know right now.

  • As Joel Gilbert proves six ways from Sunday in his new film and book, “The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America,” star witness Rachel Jeantel was an imposter. She was not Trayvon Martin’s girlfriend. She was not on the phone with him when shot by Zimmerman. She likely never met Martin.
  • At the trial, Jeantel said her nickname was “Diamond Eugene.” Through his dogged research, Gilbert found the real girlfriend, “Diamond Eugene,” full name Brittany Diamond Eugene.
  • Here is the immediate news hook: the one adult who provably knew about the witness switch is now running for Miami-Dade county commissioner with the open support of Hillary Clinton. Her name is Sybrina Fulton, the biological mother of Trayvon Martin. In her defense, Fulton did not know about the switch before it happened.
  • The evidence strongly suggests that the Martin family attorney, now civil rights superstar Benjamin Crump, helped orchestrate the witness switch.
  • Without Jeantel’s perjured testimony in an April 2012 deposition, the state would not have arrested or tried Zimmerman.

I focus on the Miami Herald editors for two reasons. One is that in 2012-2013 they did real journalism when the national media were disgracing themselves with one corruption of the facts after another.

The second is that this is undeniably a Miami story. Trayvon, Fulton, Jeantel and Diamond Eugene are all from the Miami area. If the Miami Herald ignores the story, the national media will happily let it die.

Wrote the Herald’s Douglas Hanks on October 16, “Fulton received an unprecedented boost on Sept. 27 when Clinton endorsed Fulton in a Twitter post with a fundraising link for the District 1 candidate.”

The tweet read as follows, “A Mother of the Movement to prevent gun violence, @SybrinaFulton has already helped turn tragedy into action. If you can, contribute to help her win and make the change we need.”

As Hanks noted, Fulton served as a Clinton “surrogate” in  2016 and joined Hillary for two weeks on the campaign trail. Chelsea Clinton and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker followed Hillary with their own endorsements of Fulton.

If the Miami Herald ignores the story, the national media will happily let it die…

 

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