The Black Man Democrats Love to Lynch -- Electronically

Largely the product of nine and a half hours of one-on-one interview sessions between Justice Thomas and Senator Ted Cruz, Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas is designed to provide insight into the personal and Constitutional bases for Thomas’s Supreme Court opinions.  Those opinions, alongside observations about internal dynamics of the Court, are the focus of the last half of the book, topics with which Cruz has direct experience as a clerk to former Chief Justice William Rehnquist and as a litigator before a Court that included Justice Thomas.  Cruz also provides commentary on Court cases throughout the book, generally linking Thomas’s life experience to later judicial opinions.      

Thomas’s childhood days with his mother are covered briefly, conditions of extreme deprivation made worse by the absence of a father from the family.  Anyone seeking more information about those or later years should consult Thomas’s autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son.  At age seven Clarence is sent to be raised by his grandfather, Myers Anderson, whose work ethic and self-reliance in appalling circumstances helped mold Thomas’s character.

Accordingly, Thomas’s law office is filled with various colloquial sayings uttered by Myers, for whom education was all important and for which he made sacrifices to send Clarence to Catholic school and later to seminary.  Thomas’s work mastering Latin and overcoming his Geechee dialect clearly dispels, alongside subsequent academic achievements, any idea that he lacked the intellectual qualifications to be on the Supreme Court – a canard Democrats should be loath to resurrect after the confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson.  

Beyond intellectual accomplishments, Thomas’s school days were marred by various racist incidents. Even students preparing for the priesthood weren’t immune from attitudes prevalent in the 1960s.  Words and actions like celebrating the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. caused Thomas to abandon his priestly calling.  Unfortunately his failure to follow through on a task based on a level of prejudice that paled when compared to the virulent racism Myers Anderson faced his whole life caused a rupture in Thomas’s close relationship with his grandfather.

After transferring to Holy Cross, Thomas joined the Black Student Union where resentment and left-wing politics led him to Harvard Square on April 16, 1970.  There a riot caused considerable damage and brought out the National Guard.  This marked the high water mark of the hatred Thomas felt toward whites.  Following this event he returned to Holy Cross’s chapel and prayed that God might “purge [his] heart of anger.”  That request was answered over time as Thomas immersed himself in the writing of authors like Ralph Ellison who wrote, “And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.”  It was a sentiment that aptly foreshadowed the judicial practice of “the Great Dissenter.”

During his years at Yale Law School Thomas experienced firsthand the double-edged sword of affirmative action.  Many unqualified black students were admitted who would soon drop out, but qualified students like Thomas were viewed with suspicion as possible affirmative action admissions. The latter pill became more bitter when private law firms discounted his law degree.   At Yale Thomas also saw the “god of theory” being implemented on blacks by liberals far removed from the consequences of their experiment s -- the Boston busing fiasco being a prime example.  What he did not see at New Haven was any serious attention given to the Constitution or to writings of the Founding Fathers.  It was his own study of those documents years later that fostered his appreciation of a Constitution that set forth a limited and strictly interpretive role for the Supreme Court      

Missouri Attorney General and later Senator John Danforth played a key role in Thomas’s career, giving him his first post-Yale government job in Missouri and later facilitating his appointment to jobs in the Reagan Administration, first as assistant secretary for civil rights in the Education Department and later as head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.   Significantly, alone among Thomas’s political employees at the Education Department, Anita Hill insisted on following her boss to the EEOC.  

Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing headlined by Hill’s harassment charges is covered in about fifteen pages.  Those charges, initially meant to be anonymous, were likely leaked by the sleazy and duplicitous Senate Judiciary Chairman, Joe Biden.  The book’s insider presentation of those events will be “news” for anyone under forty who gathers political impressions from the media ether.  Even I, an adult viewer of the hearings on television in the fall of 1991, wasn’t aware that Juan Williams, Washington Post’s reliably Democrat journalist, was a friend and defender of Thomas’s character during that “high-tech lynching for uppity Blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves.”   

Thomas’s dissents in his early days on the Court have become the basis for majority opinions in more recent years.  Many of those dissents protested the legal doctrine of substantive due process, a theory that puts supposed rights, like abortion and privacy, beyond the Constitutional framework of “due process,” thus taking them out of the legislative sphere altogether.  The “going further” phrase in Cruz’s title comes from Justice Thomas’s legal opinion that the Court should “go further” in undoing other substantive due process rulings that stand, like Roe v. Wade, not on Constitutional grounds but rather on the musings of justices about “the mystery of human life” (Anthony Kennedy) or “penumbras, formed by emanations” (William O. Douglas).   

Though this volume contains many biographical details relevant to Thomas’s judicial career, it isn’t a biography.  However, events related to his  character and judicial philosophy are nicely illuminated, as is the atmosphere within the Court, which is less cordial nowadays than it was during the time of Ginsberg, Scalia, and O’Conner.  Thomas, however, continues to maintain familial closeness and respect for those working around him, including janitorial staff.  Cruz’s book also provides surprising glimpses into the manufacturing of Supreme Court opinions (sometimes like sausage) alongside its insights into the justice “who is on track to become the longest-serving Supreme Court justice in American History.”

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.

Why Fauci Must Rot in Prison, by Peter Navarro

Peter Navarro’s book, Why Fauci Must Rot in Prison, is important because it lays out the prosecutorial case against Anthony Stephen Fauci -- against his arrogance, his mendacity, and his control of crucial levers within the “Medical-Industrial Complex.”  More importantly, it is written by a man who sat across the pandemic table from Fauci, witnessed his lies firsthand, and now possesses Fauci’s own diary that exposes for all to see an ego whose size is only exceeded by the worldwide disaster his professional obsession with gain-of-function research helped spawn.

The book is also written by a man who loathes the diminutive scientist who possibly had a hand in sending its author to prison on two misdemeanor charges for refusing to testify before the corrupt January 6 congressional committee in 2022.  At the time of his virtually unprecedented indictment Navarro had continued being critical of Fauci’s pandemic policies as Biden’s Chief Medical Advisor.  A handful of entries about prison conditions and inmates, especially vis-à-vis a perverse legal system, appear in the book.    

Both Navarro and Fauci were advisors to Trump before the pandemic became a pandemic.  In late January, 2020, Trump was considering a travel ban from China.  As his diary confirms, Fauci initially opposed the ban and forcefully said so in a meeting with Navarro and others.  The economist Navarro made a cost-benefit calculation that allowing travel could cost thousands of lives but an unnecessary travel ban would have no catastrophic impact.  Though Fauci eventually endorsed Trump’s decision, his July 8 diary entry omits his initial opposition and specifically targets Navarro:  “He said that I said not to shut down China (this coming from Peter Navarro) (when I actually said to shut it down).  He is also saying that I was against masks before I was for them.  Someone is obviously feeding him this shit.”  Fauci’s animosity toward opponents runs throughout a diary which also suggests selective amnesia about topics (like masks) that he wishes to forget.

A disagreement the author believes did cost thousands of lives involved the drug hydroxychloroquine.  By this time Navarro had been designated Trump’s Defense Production Act Policy Coordinator and had gathered millions of doses of the drug for widespread distribution.  On March 18^th Fauci’s diary acknowledges the possible usefulness of hydroxychloroquine.  But seventeen days later in a meeting with a furious Navarro, who slammed a five-inch thick dossier of studies supporting the drug in front of Fauci, the same man dismissed that evidence as “anecdotal.”  What had changed in the interim was, it seems, Trump’s endorsement and the media’s TDS trashing of the drug. 

Later in the book Navarro relates the case of “country doctor” Vladimir Zelenko whose testimony   about hydroxychloroquine’s effectiveness when given prior to hospitalization was bureaucratically changed into a protocol for hospital administration only.  Navarro notes that “a definition of evidence [was employed] under which what Zev Zelenko saw in his own waiting room did not count as evidence at all.”  He then contrasts the scrupulous standard of evidence Fauci applied to hydroxychloroquine with the standard years later employed for the expensive patented drug Paxlovid, which not only failed to work with America’s largely vaccinated population but even had a virus rebound effect that fittingly attacked Dr. Fauci.  “The burden of proof that was infinite for the generic nobody owned became weightless for the drug Big Pharma could cash in on.”

Navarro and Fauci clashed again over prolonged lockdowns, a policy opposed by Navarro and later deemed in The Great Barrington Resolution (October, 2020) a cure worse than the disease.  Again Fauci’s diary shows him a petty tyrant who doesn’t brook disagreement and is prepared to smear and censor recognized scholars as “fringe” if it serves his purposes.  The same can be said of Fauci’s National Institutes of Health boss and natural origin co-conspirator, Francis Collins, who urged a “quick and devastating public takedown” of the Resolution -- strange language for men who consider themselves the embodiment of science.  

The author’s prosecution of Fauci also includes diary material (some as early as 2001) that implicates the NIAID director in funding gain-of-function research that even the Pentagon’s advanced-research arm, DARPA, deemed too risky.  One of those grants wound up, thanks to EcoHealth’s Peter Daszak, in Wuhan.  Diary entries also point to Fauci’s covert orchestration of the “Proximal Origin” paper that established a natural-origin-for-COVID narrative and deflected attention from the obvious lab-leak hypothesis.    

In pressing his case against Biden’s pandemic czar, Navarro focuses attention on numerous other pieces of evidence, each accompanied by a derisive label for the defendant:  Forced Jab Tony, Bad Booster Tony, Myocarditis Tony, Miscarriage Tony, Triple-Dip Tony (i.e. profiting from the pandemic).   In brief, Fauci worked to coerce almost everyone to take an experimental non-vaccine by making false or unverified claims about its effectiveness and safety, just as he pressed for a devastating lockdown of the economy and schools. 

In closing I must note that Navarro’s book deserves a good editing job.  A prospective reader should not expect a polished product.  What he or she will get is firsthand evidence of Fauci-Navarro encounters alongside critical diary entries, all presented in what I would consider first draft form.  The book’s final chapters also contain Navarro’s plan for actually prosecuting Fauci in state courts, forty pages that a good editor, I believe, would aggressively abridge and simplify.   

 That said, Navarro’s access to Fauci’s government server diary serves as a temporary capstone and validation for various books and documentaries that have implicated Tony Fauci in the most destructive pandemic and pandemic response in modern history.  (Cf. RFK Jr.’s The Real Anthony Fauci; Jenner Furst’s documentary “Thank You, Dr. Fauci”; the WSJ’s documentary “The Lockdown Dissidents”; Rand Paul’s Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up; and to a certain extent Judy Mikovits’s, Plague of Corruption)

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.

The Great Feminization, Wokeness, and the Rule of Law

“Everything you think about as Wokeness is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.”  That was the major thesis of an eye-opening seventeen minute talk by Helen Andrews at a National Conservative conference in September last year. 

“The Great Feminization” is one of the seven most impactful revolutions that economist Tyler Cowan listed as occurring within his lifetime, a revolution whose importance becomes more visible every day.  While the pop-culture and media linger on the absurd topic of patriarchy, females have taken or will soon take majority roles in numerous critical professions.

Females already constitute majorities in law and medical schools as well as college faculties.  Accordingly, they now receive the majority of B.A.s and Ph.D.s.  And in the formerly male-dominated field of psychology, eighty percent of new entrants are female.  Females also constitute the majority of law firm associates as well as persons in white collar jobs that require a college degree.  Four of the nine Supreme Court justices are now female as is nearly thirty percent of Congress.  Females are also prominent in positions such as Police Chief, Police Commissioner, and Fire Chief, roles that would have seemed bizarre for a woman only a few decades ago.

This demographic revolution brings with it a change that has been, depending on the issue in question, alternately denied and asserted.  Andrews bluntly asserts the obvious.  Females, far from being just the same as men, generally emphasize empathy over rationality, safety over risk, and cohesion over competition and hierarchy -- a values cocktail that currently blends nicely into Woke ideology.  Approximately two-thirds of men, for example, say free speech is more important than an inclusive society.  With women those preferences are reversed.  Generally speaking, females employ an ethic of caring whereas men are more focused on justice and facts.  In important venues, Andrews argues, this values reorientation will have significant or even disastrous effects.

Businesses more attentive to feminine HR directives and equity requirements are more likely to foster a collegial environment where feelings trump productivity and innovation.  In the academy most conservative views have long been unspeakable, but with the rise of feminist faculties the arena of acceptable debate has shrunk even further, and milk and cookies may be provided for fragile egos “triggered” by opposing perspectives.  In 2017, Google software engineer James Damore lost his job for speculating that women were underrepresented in its technical positions for biological reasons, an opinion that left him without a single colleague to back him up.  Years earlier a female MIT professor went into vapors when Harvard President Larry Summers made a similar suggestion that also cost him his post, a position held not long ago by a black female with plagiarism issues and a mediocre academic resume.    

Andrews reserves her most ominous warning for the field of law, about which she says, “The rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female.”  With respect to immigration, she notes, a system more attuned to feelings than existing law already prevails.  Border enforcement was ignored under Biden ostensibly out of compassion for “migrants” and their often non-existent families.  Currently ICE is vilified and obstructed from performing its congressionally mandated duty based largely on emotional objections.  Had Andrews given her talk this September, the Lindsay Clancy trial could have been employed as an another example of a feminized legal system, with jury members hoping to make things better for women, a goal already passionately expressed by pink-garbed demonstrators outside the courtroom. 

Facts, evidence, and established rules, Andrews insists, must be foremost in the practice of law, especially on the part of judges and prosecutors.  New York’s Letitia James could have served as Andrews’s poster girl for a contrary approach.  The A.G.’s pledge to use her office to jail Trump reminded Constitutional lawyer Alan Dershowitz of the procedure employed under Stalin:  “Show me the man; I’ll find the crime.”  In a recent political debate James endorsed the following prosecutorial methodology:  “You don’t have to look at the facts and the law.  All you have to do is study what they do.”  Add to those violations of procedure Senator Elissa Slotkin's threats against potential Trump aides and you have another example of the mentality that’s destroying the rule of law.

Andrews’s suggestion for avoiding the feminization of law, medicine, and business is to take the feminine thumb off the scales by undoing HR’s lawsuit-averse equity standards and workplace rules. That’s something easier said than done since most HR teams aren’t bothered by a statistical underrepresentation of men, nor are they eager to revise their equity mentality.  More difficult, and more to the point in my view, is the task of erasing  a cultural mantra that for half a century has calculated the worth of unpaid female homemakers raising their children at exactly zero.  That’s the tacit assumption behind male-female salary ratios that only count work done for hire and seldom compare similar job and experience levels to each other.  No wonder women nowadays value a career (71%) far more than getting married and raising a family (18-22%).  Changing that cultural dynamic dwarfs the HR obstacle which itself requires prior management initiative.

The rise of feminist majorities in major professions has given the multi-faceted poison of Wokeness an added boost, but power-hungry and cynical politicians, male and female, have been undermining the American legal system since Woodrow Wilson, while marriage and the family have been under attack since the 1960s.  Andrews rightly directs attention to profoundly negative consequences that accompany institutional feminization, but one must not ignore the fact that Marxists, Democrats, and Islamists have used that transformation for their own purposes, just as they’ve used immigration for political advantage.  Anyone confronting the maladies coincident with culture’s feminization should follow the money to see who is ultimately pulling the strings.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.

Marco Rubio: The Spirit that Created Western Civilization

Seldom does a politician deliver a speech with more historical and cultural breadth than Marco Rubio’s recent speech in Greece with the Acropolis standing appropriately in the background.  Moving beyond the standard acknowledgement of Greek democracy, Rubio knitted together Plato and Aristotle with the theologically grounded philosophies of Augustine and Aquinas that form the intellectual and spiritual foundation for Western civilization.  

But the term around which his entire talk revolved was the Greek word thumos, a concept Plato employs to speak about the spirited element of human nature that fuels, in Rubio’s words, “the fire of passion, strength, courage, [and] pride” that “is the heart of great civilizations.”  Plato saw this function as allied with reason against appetite and as the source of achievements attained through competition and struggle, strivings formalized in the Greek agon which revealed excellence in various fields of endeavor.  Rubio links this essential trait with the Western drive to explore, to invent, and to devote one’s efforts to a cause higher than self.  This characteristic, the root of courage, has come under sustained attack both from within and from without the West.

Even during World War II C. S. Lewis denounced philosophical schools and educational materials that viewed emotion-laden patriotic aphorisms as meaningless propaganda.  In The Abolition of Man he noted that this didactic perspective was destined to create “men without chests” – “chests” being Lewis’s word for Plato’s thumos.  Today’s critique of patriotism, by contrast, comes from highly emotional, one-sided, and irrational condemnations of a country no one could be proud of. 

These portraits omit everything on the positive side of the national ledger and magnify everything negative.  The Pilgrims with their biblical virtues and stoic perseverance in the face of death are transmogrified along with pioneer homesteaders (Giants in the Earth) into genocidal racists who butcher Disneyesque natives.  The Founding Fathers who, “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence,” signed the Declaration of Independence are disparaged as old white men and slave owners.  Visions of legal, material, and scientific progress are replaced by a Dorian Gray portrait of sexism, xenophobia, and capitalist oppression that waxes more contemptible with each retelling.    

Beyond legacy media, university Marxists, and a K-12 education system crafted by leftist union leaders, popular culture’s incessant messaging tends to produce iPhone-obsessed couch potatoes for whom instant gratification is regularly touted as a “right” alongside abortion, health care, and gender-affirming mutilation -- all provided by a government possessing a prolific money tree.  In short, the “good life” is portrayed as one devoid of struggle where everyone gets a participation trophy and life’s highest goal is something akin to an eighty-five year “Life of Julia” vacation.  

Of course there are still millions of Americans who exhibit the courage, inventiveness, dedication, and selflessness fueled by the same character trait about which Plato and C.S. Lewis spoke.  That trait is found most conspicuously in military service and law enforcement.  Unfortunately, those professions have been debased by DEI politicization and vicious slander.  Warriors became pawns in social experimentation where drag queens were featured to emphasize inclusiveness, the proper thumos reaction to which would be revulsion and shame -- an emotional cocktail more difficult to swallow for disciples of Achilles than insults hurled by cowardly politicians at ICE and police officers.  

The Trump Administration, to its credit, has attempted to reverse this anti-American, anti-Western sentiment first promulgated at the Presidential level by Barack Obama’s “apology tour.”  The Secretary of War has touted the martial virtues of unit-cohesion, strength, and patriotism and has scrapped measures designed to produce inclusivity and equity.  Trump has already reversed Woke erasures of Columbus Day and patriotic statuary, and now has his sights on the Smithsonian Institution’s pervasive hate-America leitmotif.  Of course Trump himself with his brash aggressiveness and determination stands as the personification of a warrior spirit that has overcome unprecedented  conspiracies and media slanders, plus a near fatal assassination attempt, all for the sake of national revival.  Lesser souls would have chosen a luxurious retirement.

A poignant observation in Rubio’s speech was this statement, “We will either choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all.”  The “we” in his sentence was directed not only to European allies, whose socialist secularism has long weakened their resolve, but also to Americans headed in the same direction.  Nations no longer bolstered by love of country and love of God, populated by leaders incapable of distinguishing right from wrong or men from women, stand defenseless against passionate invaders disguised as immigrants and asylum seekers.   

It’s possible that the feminization of America, as Helen Andrews notes in another recent speech, has passed the tipping point so that suicidal empathy will prevail on a national basis rather than the distinctively masculine virtues of courage and a willingness to fight for principle.  (Among other statistics, Andrews notes that women now constitute the majority in law schools, medical schools, and college faculties. They receive the majority of B.A.s and Ph.D.s, and are over 50% of white collar workers with degrees.  The publishing industry is almost 80% female, and the discipline of psychology is becoming overwhelmingly female.  The same trend toward majority status applies to the judiciary where 63% of Joe Biden’s appointments were female.)  As Andrews warns, “The rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female.”

In 1962 John F. Kennedy made this declaration that bristles with the quality Rubio praised:      

We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and to do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others too.

 

Today it’s a question whether the descendents of those who risked their lives and sacred honor to found this nation, who died in staggering numbers to free slaves and maintain the Union, who endured the Great Depression and defeated the twin evils of fascism and communism will find an increase in the price of gasoline too great a burden to focus their gaze on opponents who are “fundamentally transforming” a nation once rooted in Judeo-Christian values.  November 3^rd will provide a provisional answer to that question.                     

 

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge

MASSACHUSETTS MADNESS

How the mighty have fallen.  Massachusetts, once the home of John Adams, the “Atlas of American independence” and future President of the United States, is now led by Maura Healey, the state’s first lesbian governor and the chief executive who recently signed a bill protecting a woman’s right to abort her baby up to the point of birth.  At the signing ceremony a gaggle of females standing behind her desk applauded enthusiastically.  Meanwhile in Plymouth, Massachusetts, a crowd of ladies in pink voiced their enthusiastic support for Lindsay Clancy, who was on trial for strangling the life out of her three children -- Cora, Dawson, and Callan.   

Thirty years earlier the distinguished Democrat New York Senator and former Harvard Professor Patrick Moynihan, who was not a pro-life warrior, compared partial birth abortion to infanticide.  One can only imagine Abigail Adams cringing at the thought of her “remember the ladies” request to John being invoked by twenty-first century feminists to cheer unrestricted abortion as health care and to invoke inadequate medical treatment plus postpartum psychosis as a legal excuse for a mom carefully planning and carrying out the extermination of her three children over the span of eighteen minutes.

It at least makes sense that the same state that elected a governor who supports unrestricted abortion also devised an insanity defense putting the burden of proof on the prosecution rather than the defense.  In addition, Bay State prosecutors must prove not only that defendants know the difference between right and wrong but also that they can control their actions.  This virtually insuperable standard unique to Massachusetts resembles the obligation to prove a negative, to prove it twice, and to prove it “beyond a reasonable doubt.”  She’s “not” cognitively unaware of standards of right and wrong, and she’s “not” unable to control her actions.  Throw in the fact that the criminal act concerns killing three kids, and the prosecution’s task becomes akin to climbing Mt. Everest.

Governor Healey also recently signed the mendaciously labeled “Protect Act,” a law that further limits the sanctuary state’s cooperation with ICE and guarantees that illegal aliens are protected, as much as reasonably possible, from deportation.  Even before Healey’s new law the police department of Boston’s super-Woke Mayor Michelle Wu, the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, ignored ICE detainers on scores of illegals, among them aliens accused of arson, child abuse, assault, and drug dealing. 

Then there’s Ed Markey, the state’s octogenarian senator who proclaimed his support for a transgender bill of rights after easily defeating his forty-seven-year-old primary opponent with similar leftist credentials.  This eccentric topic became a campaign issue for Democrats thanks to Congressman Moulton’s ill-advised statement in 2024, "I have two little girls. I don't want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.”  He added that “as a Democrat I'm supposed to be afraid to say that.”  Even after offering a groveling apology of sorts, the former marine would discover that fear was, indeed, warranted for his perfectly sensible statement in madly blue Massachusetts, a locale where “gender-affirming care” for minors is already a state constitutional right that extends to youngsters from other states who seek to cure their anxieties by mutilating their bodies.

One should remember that Massachusetts is also the state that continued to reelect Ted Kennedy to the Senate seven times even after the senator abandoned a car he had driven off a bridge at Chappaquiddick Island, a car that still contained a woman who was not his then-pregnant wife.  Mary Jo Kopechne likely died of suffocation while Kennedy returned to the party cottage from which the two had left late that night.  The police were contacted approximately ten hours later, giving Kennedy time, if needed, to sober up, though he was never given an alcohol test.  The judicial slap on the wrist that followed for abandoning the scene of the accident didn’t deter the state’s highly educated residents from sending Ted back to the Senate a year later in 1970 with 62% of the vote.  A blow by blow recounting of the incident can be found in this 2018 Politico review of the film “Chappaquiddick.” 

Massachusetts lawmakers are currently considering a bill that would give Muslims a greater voice in state government and address areas of discrimination presumably perpetrated against that community.  The bill would create an eleven-member commission to work with state officials on areas of concern to Muslims such as education, civil rights, health care, employment, and, of course, Islamophobia.   When those familiar topics inevitably morph into madrasa lessons, community cutouts for sharia law, and employment standards  that reflect Muslim mores vis-à-vis pork, dogs, female attire, and the like, one wonders if even inveterate Bay State virtue signalers might find such concessions to “an oppressed minority” a “bridge too far.”

Recently a woman in Illinois who closely followed the Clancy trial has allegedly killed her two-year-old child by ligature compression of the neck in her basement, the same method and location of Clancy’s acknowledged victims.  Following the homicide the accused killer also inflicted on herself some perfunctory suicide cuts.  Fortunately, Illinois doesn’t require the state to prove what should be the defense’s burden, though the defense only needs “clear and convincing” evidence, not evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt” that a perpetrator doesn’t know right from wrong.  While Massachusetts boasts that almost half its adults have college degrees and likely takes pride in the fact that it’s the most secular state in the union, perhaps a less ideologically enthralled and more religiously grounded jury pool in the Midwest might find it possible to believe a mother can actually be held legally culpable for strangling her child to death.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.

 

Is Anyone Really Guilty Anymore?

“Justice delayed is justice denied.”  “The wheels of justice grind slowly but ever so fine.”  “Better that one-hundred guilty persons go free than one innocent person should suffer.”  These are incompatible aphorisms that at various times have been asserted about the American justice system.  

The first was clearly employed when William McKinley was assassinated in 1901.  The President died on September 14, and his killer was executed a month and a half later.  As a Facebook contributor noted, “If the justice system worked the way it did for McKinley, [Tyler] Robinson would have been dead by December, 2025.”  More accurately, Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer would have exited this life by Halloween last year.  

The assertion that “justice delayed is justice denied,” despite its frequent repetition, is a concept honored more in the breach than in the observance.  Tyler Robinson’s preliminary hearing, for example, won’t be concluded until September, almost a year after Kirk’s murder.  Karmelo Anthony’s trial took over fourteen months after the knife-totting youngster stabbed and killed Austin Metcalf at a high school track meet.  Recently Anthony’s hearing for a retrial was denied.  Appeals will doubtless follow.    

That the wheels of modern American justice “grind slowly” is obvious, but the “ever so fine” conclusion is risible.  Jury or judge politicization is clear in cases involving, for example, O.J. Simpson, Donald Trump, and thousands of January 6 defendants.  Meanwhile, we wait without much hope for justice to be “ground out” for the high-profile criminals involved in Crossfire Hurricane and Arctic Frost. 

Surprisingly, Benjamin Franklin embraced the hundred-to-one, guilty-to-innocent cliché, an exaggeration of the figure previously articulated by England’s PM William Blackstone who put the ratio at a more modest ten to one.  Practically speaking, anyone who touts Franklin’s formula effectively washes his hands of blood shed on the streets by the scores of criminals who evade punishment for the sake of an unreasonable legal scorecard.  Moreover, since criminals tend to reoffend and do so more frequently if the odds of being punished are slight, the number of innocent victims quickly grows to multiples of the initial figure.  In short, the assertion of a hundred to one standard is a form of “suicidal empathy” or, more accurately, “narcissistic empathy”-- i.e. a statement that flatters the speaker’s ego and overlooks victims actually sacrificed for the sake of a rhetorical yardstick.   

Of course law enforcement and the system of justice should be structured to avoid sending innocent people to prison, but the modern fixation on one side of the judicial and law enforcement equation has devastating consequences.  Here’s an alternate aphorism that should gain traction:  “The fewer criminals caught and expeditiously punished, the more innocents will be harmed by criminals.”  Conversely, the more criminals caught and swiftly punished, the fewer innocent victims will be harmed.  This inverse correlation is all the more relevant since it’s widely conceded that crime, especially violent crime, is largely concentrated in a small portion of the population, typically estimated at five percent or less.  El Salvador’s President Bukele, much vilified abroad but adored at home, totally transformed his country from a gang-ruled hellhole to a playground sanctuary for children by imprisoning one percent of the population.     

So why has our judicial system changed so much from the days of McKinley’s assassination when swift justice was the order of the day to the present where a plethora of “safeguards” have been placed on law enforcement and within the judicial system to prevent innocent individuals from being falsely convicted of a crime and guilty persons from being convicted based on faulty procedures?   The “not one innocent” mentality is largely the product, I believe, of a therapeutic culture in which the idea of personal responsibility has been drastically attenuated.  Villainy has been scaled down to reduced mental capacity or unfortunate environmental circumstances as the psychiatrist Karl Menninger noted a half-century ago in his book Whatever Happened to Sin.  

That’s not to say that such factors are totally irrelevant, but our obsessive desire for non-volitional explanations arises alongside an even deeper desire to deny the reality of evil.  Accordingly, those hundred guilty persons theoretically going free are vaguely felt to be victims of biology or society.  More specifically, for many females demonstrating outside the Clancy trial in Massachusetts it’s inconceivable that a woman would knowingly strangle her three young children.  It’s just too evil.  Thus, the heinous act becomes itself an argument against her criminal culpability and diffuse responsibility falls instead on medical practitioners and the pharmaceutical industry.  

In short, according to this perspective evil doesn’t really exist in individuals but rather in institutions and persons directing those institutions.  It’s a fantasy touted by Rousseau who claimed people are born good but are corrupted by society, a belief that leaves hanging a basic question:  How does a corrupt society arise from naturally good humans?  That’s not a problem faced by those who believe evil lies within the human heart and that, as Immanuel Kant asserted (albeit in German), “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”  It’s a thought that at least helps explain the legal and human foibles discussed above. 

 Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.

Blame Truth for Jason Arday’s Death

One of Seinfeld’s poignant scenes revolved around the ambiguous pigment of Elaine’s latest boyfriend.  Was he or was he not black?  Jerry, Elaine, and George are pondering the question and wondering if they should be doing so.  George says flatly that the discussion is not ok.  Finally, when a black waitress arrives at the trio’s booth to deliver checks, all three frantically toss bills toward her in a visual demonstration of liberal guilt.

Something similar is now transpiring in the case of Jason Arday, a Cambridge Professor who recently committed suicide following exposure of his academic plagiarism and wildly fictitious life story.  That story included, among other imagined hurdles and accomplishments, early autism, muteness till age eleven, illiteracy prior to age eighteen, teenage epilepsy spawned by a physical attack, a brain tumor experienced while writing his dissertation, a coma triggered by a car accident, a mini-stroke, a fractured fibula suffered on one of the thirty-five marathons that he ran in thirty days (nine of which were done with the injury), and a six-hundred mile run between London and Edinburgh accomplished in six days (later amended to twelve days). Those athletic feats were said to have raised £5.5 million for eighty charities.

On the academic front, Arday’s plagiarism was extensive.  Not only was his dissertation lifted inordinately from a thesis written six years earlier, his work was also filled with grammatical errors that even extended to its title: “An exploration of peer-mentoring among student teachers’ to inform reflective practice within the context of action research.” The dissertation whose work was stolen had a similar title with an appropriate apostrophe following the word “teachers”:  “An analysis of the concept reflective practice and an investigation into the development of student teachers’ reflective practice within the context of action research.”

Apparently neither Arday’s diploma-awarding institution in Liverpool nor Cambridge University did any digging into his implausible background story or Arday’s clearly purloined and unscholarly dissertation.  All they cared about was his DEI credentials. The same ideological criteria apply to the post mortems that blame not Arday but rather the “racists” and “fascists” who exposed his lies. 

Arday himself employed similar words to vilify truth tellers looking into his mendacity.  He even used his keynote address to the British Sociological Association last April to excoriate white conservatives and right-wing activists for using a “playbook” to target black academics like Harvard’s Claudine Gay and, implicitly, himself.  Prior to his resignation Arday had even engaged law enforcement and later the defamation law firm Carter-Ruck to threaten critics with financially ruinous and possibly career-ending charges of racism.

A vigil of thousands in Trafalgar Square including the U.K.’s first black MP echoed Arday’s BSA address by blaming his death on a vicious and racist media campaign.  Arday’s own family blamed a “campaign of sustained abuse.”  A similar song was sung by London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan who denounced “a pernicious public shaming.”  Another prominent Arday supporter referred to a “racist witch hunt” while others called on Prime Minister Burnham to “commission a public inquiry into the role of the press in Arday’s death.”  Cambridge itself, prior to Arday’s resignation, called the plagiarism allegations against the sociology professor “a vile campaign” but since his death have focused primarily on the resources it offered their former “best in the world” race and education scholar, an obvious CYA tack.  

Somewhat surprisingly, an article in The Atlantic by Graeme Wood places significant blame on Arday himself but reserves his most creative criticism for Arday’s enablers, especially Cambridge University, which utilized his fantastic life story and academic status for its own purposes. “They may as well have taken a skin-and-bones Make-A-Wish kid, told him that he could fly, and shot him out of a cannon.”  Graeme also notes that “journalists were not the ones who stuffed Arday into the cannon and lit the fuse,” conveniently overlooking the years of press stuffing for the sake of a great, though unscrutinized, DEI story line.

The truth seems clear to me.  Arday would never have received a Ph.D., much less a distinguished Professorship at Cambridge, were it not for his race and a  desperate desire for DEI credentials on the part of universities corrupted by that ideology.  His back story made the exchange of integrity for “equity credit” all the more enticing, especially since integrity in the humanities has long since been compromised in the service of postmodernism and political clout.  For ideologues of that stripe traditional standards of right and wrong are merely instruments created to support entrenched power.  Given that perspective, any equity-based excuse will serve to absolve a comrade from punishment for purloined scholarship and a blizzard of biographical lies.

You almost have to give Arday credit for playing the academic establishment for the frauds they are by showing just how much he could get away with.  His own willingness to use racist smears and legal goons to intimidate and destroy critics, however, reveals a viciousness as despicable as that of the morally and intellectually vacuous universities he conned.  And now we learn that the academic, Nathan Cofnas, who clearly exposed Arday’s plagiarism, has been suspended by Ghent University.

While a waitress receiving inordinate tips from the Seinfeld crew for an innocent conversation is humorous, there’s nothing funny about the political and cultural weaponization of race for the sake of an ideology that has largely ruined higher education and filled society with individuals and institutions willing to destroy anyone possessing the audacity to tell the truth.                                                           

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.

The Lockdown Dissidents Vindicated - Why is Fauci not in Jail?

Senator Rand Paul says his wife regularly greets him at home with this question, “Why is Tony Fauci not yet in jail?” That peculiar welcome suggests she knows what many folks know but not enough powerful government and media figures who are willing to follow the evidence to its logical conclusion.

Several prosecutorial points were included in Jenner Furst’s documentary, Thank You, Dr. Fauci, a late 2024 film focused on the doctor’s decades-long obsession with gain-of-function research, the gene-splicing technique that almost certainly led to the creation of the Wuhan virus and to a pandemic that caused a large number of excess deaths worldwide, perhaps mounting to the millions. A recently released Wall Street Journal documentary written and directed by Michael Pack focuses on the central role played by Fauci in pushing the counterproductive COVID lockdowns and in vilifying health experts who opposed those draconian measures. Its title: The Lockdown Dissidents.

Furst’s film showed Fauci using his influence to squelch prominent scientific voices that saw the new virus as a gain-of-function lab creation, not a bat-mediated wet market disease. The latter documentary fits the same manipulative profile. First, Fauci made himself the lead health official on the pandemic response team, to the amazement of CDC Head Dr. Robert Redfield. Then Fauci pushed a nationwide 15-day lockdown that was soon extended indefinitely, a pandemic response at odds with accepted quarantine protocols. Finally, he prescribed absurd masking and distancing measures designed to scare the public into submission. Inspired by the ruthless Communist Chinese response to the pandemic, Fauci advised the public, “If it looks like you’re overreacting, you’re probably doing the right thing.”

Fauci continued to push the fear button in a meeting of the pandemic response group to which an outside voice, Dr. Scott Atlas, had been added by President Trump. When Fauci observed that people weren’t sufficiently afraid to listen to the group’s directives, Atlas couldn’t believe his ears and objected that increasing public fear was totally unethical. That reply ended whatever influence Atlas might have had within the group, especially since he favored a traditional public health response to COVID.

Atlas then looked for allies outside the group that was officially led by Fauci-mentored Dr. Deborah Birx. One of those allies was the current head of the National Institute of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Bhattacharya had conducted his own study in Santa Clara, California, and it showed that COVID-19 was already sufficiently widespread to make societal lockdowns meaningless. In addition, his findings revealed a mortality rate of .2% or less with fatalities concentrated in older individuals and virtually nonexistent in school children. Similar studies led most European countries to reopen their schools in the fall of 2020. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s attempt to “follow the science,” however, was opposed not only by Fauci’s group guidance but also, with extreme vitriol, by teachers union president Randi Weingarten.

In the face of such opposition unmoored to science, Atlas, Bhattacharya, Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, and Harvard’s Dr. Martin Kulldorff met in Great Barrington, Massachusetts early in October, 2020, and produced The Great Barrington Resolution, a document eventually endorsed by over sixty thousand medical scientists and practitioners plus nearly nine-hundred-thousand concerned citizens. The statement provided clear reasons for rejecting the prevailing lockdown procedures and for employing a “Focused Protection” strategy aimed at vulnerable groups, primarily the elderly. Among its concluding sentences was the following: “Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal.”

Fauci and his NIH accomplice, Francis Collins, couldn’t let this science stand. Almost immediately, Collins sent an email to Fauci demanding “a quick and devastating published take down” of the Resolution by falsely describing its authors as “fringe epidemiologists.” As Atlas and Bhattacharya attest, the “take down” was successful thanks to complicit scientists, intimidation tactics (including death threats), and outlandish media suppression of scientific discourse, a censorship regime put on steroids during the Biden Administration with its “epidemic of the unvaxxed” propaganda.

Consequently, Fauci’s recommended lockdowns that included schools, houses of worship, small businesses, and sporting events largely continued. In Gavin Newsom’s California, the destruction of freedom even extended to a lone surfer. Meanwhile, politicized and cowardly scientists were okay with massive BLM protests after the death of George Floyd.

The film concludes with a post-mortem vindication of the pandemic approach advocated by the Barrington Resolution. Florida was a state that remained largely open during the pandemic while California was among the most locked down. After evaluating total excess deaths, Florida came out better than the once Golden State. In Europe, the same result was obtained for non-lockdown Sweden vis-à-vis Germany. It should also be noted that these comparisons only measured excess deaths, not the economic, psychological, or educational damage of lockdowns.

People were regularly encouraged by Jewish leaders to “never forget” the Holocaust, a plea that’s becoming a faint echo nowadays. In similar fashion, we should resist the desire to forget the price paid for Dr. Fauci’s dream of creating novel vaccines for yet-to-appear superviruses -- a toll that includes not only millions of deaths but also the enduring aftereffects of the fear he stoked and the tyrannical lockdowns he promoted. Those disastrous results are why Rand Paul’s wife and many others believe Anthony Fauci deserves a “lockdown” of his own.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California. His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle, as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.

Related Topics: COVID, Great Barrington Declaration, Anthony Fauci