Kyle Rittenhouse: The White-Only American Dream (Part II)

 Nov 26, 2021

Source: Al Mayadeen

By Mohammad Al-Jaber

Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal opened the door for much of the American right to champion their anti-BLM and pro-gun narrative; Exploiting a tragedy for their interests does not seem too surprising.

The police force is a system that shares racism with the judiciary in the United States, making it an accomplice

From a protest calling for racial equality in the United States to a blood bath that saw a white teen claiming the lives of protestors. That is how the protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin on August 25, 2020, unfolded, and over a year later, the killer was acquitted of his crimes.

After reflecting on how the justice system was an accomplice to the acquittal of the white teenager and racial discrimination in the United States in Part I, it will be revealed how the police contribute to the same issue, in addition to shedding light on Rittenhouse’s trial and its aftermath.

Police force

The police force is a system that shares racism with the judiciary in the United States. In fact, it is what delivers the alleged offenders to the wolves of the US courts, who then do with them as they wish. 

There is so much evidence to support this “claim” that amounts to a fact, such as the fact that Black people are 27% more likely to be killed by the police, 35% more likely to be unarmed, and 36%  less likely to be threatening someone when killed.

Solid facts prove that the police have been notorious for their treatment of minorities, especially black people.

Looking back to 2020, protests erupted across the states after a policeman brutally knelt on the neck of a black man for 8 minutes 46 seconds, killing him on the scene as he was pleading for his life. Said protests resulted in an awareness campaign on racism in the US, which put many forgotten cases in the spotlight and called for more accountability in future ones.

Not in any particular order, we will be shining the light on several cases of police brutality against black people across the United States.

Case 1: Tamir Rice

Tamir Rice was only a 12-year-old boy at the time of his murder at the hands of white police officer Timothy Loehmann under the pretext of the young kid possessing a firearm.

Someone had called the police in Cleveland, Ohio, about a male carrying a gun in the area, which the caller said was fake, and reiterated his statement later in the call, also informing the police that the suspect was “probably a juvenile.”

Tamir Rice was killed while carrying a replica gun, a toy in essence, while Kyle Rittenhouse walked by police vehicles after shooting several people without getting shot as someone was yelling at the police about the crime he had just committed.

“Rittenhouse had his hands up while walking toward and past police vehicles.”

Well so did case 2:

Adam Toledo

Adam was a 13-year-old Latino boy who was shot and killed by the Chicago police for possession of a weapon – which was later retrieved from the scene for it to appear that it was an empty 9mm handgun – while complying with the police officer’s orders.

Toledo had his hands in the air when the police officer shot him, body-cam footage showed.

So why was Kyle Rittenhouse, a white teenager brandishing an AR-15 which the police knew was loaded due to information acquired from a pedestrian, treated so differently than Adam Toledo, a Latino child, who was no older than 13 and complied with the officer’s orders but got shot nonetheless?

Maybe Kyle’s complexion stopped him from looking suspicious holding his AR despite someone shouting that he had just shot several people.

Perhaps the next case will reveal the shocking reality of police racial prejudice.

Case 3: Elijah McClain

Elijah McClain was a 23-year-old autistic Black man who was killed at the hands of the police and paramedics after three white officers stopped him on the grounds that he “looked suspicious.” Elijah had been wearing an open ski mask to protect himself from chronic chills caused by his anemia. He was also wearing headphones, which prevented him from hearing calls from the police officers. McClain objectively did nothing wrong, which he voiced to the police officers as they were wrestling him to the ground ahead of putting him in a chokehold. 

McClain was pleading and telling the police officers he could not breathe while urging them to respect his boundaries as he was introverted.

McClain went unconscious, prompting the police officers to release him from the chokehold. Afterward, a medic injected McClain with 500mg of ketamine to sedate him because he was struggling after regaining consciousness.

Due to the drugs administered into his system, alongside the stressful situation he was in, Elijah went into cardiac arrest. Three days after arriving at the hospital, he was declared brain dead, and then removed from life support three days thereafter.

All the aforementioned “cases” are not simply “arguments” to support a claim: They are human beings who lost their lives to an unfair system without their killers receiving the proper justice.

Tamir Rice’s killer, Timothy Loehmann, was sacked from his job without any charges. Adam Toledo’s killer, Eric Stillman, was also just sacked without charges. Elijah McClain’s killers, Nathan Woodyard, Jason Rosenblatt, and Randy Roedema, have been indicted, but nothing much is anticipated since we are talking about the US justice system, especially since we’re talking about the same system that did not take any action against the cop murderers of Breonna Taylor, who was fatally shot in the safety of her own home, and acquitted the killer of teenage black honor student Antwon Rose II.

And we must not forget that over the past 15 years, only 44 officers (out of the 121 who faced murder or manslaughter charges) have been convicted, and often for lesser offenses, just like Breonna Taylor’s case.

The trial, again

Now, back to the trial.

Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted on all charges, but let’s look at those trying him, and who practically declared it open season against protestors through their acquittal.

The jury

The jury was picked in one day, and it comprised 20 members – 11 women and nine men, nothing out of the ordinary. It nearly aced the male-to-female ratio of the US population. However, one aspect of this jury could explain many things: out of the 20 members, only one member was from an ethnic minority, the rest were all white. 

The jury was overwhelmingly white and was trying a white teenager who killed citizens protesting for black lives. One wonders how Kyle was acquitted with all this adversity he was facing in the trial.

The judge

Judge Bruce Schroeder, also white – surprisingly – left much more to be desired. From ruling that the victims of Kyle’s criminality should not be called “victims,” but rather “rioters,” “looters,” and “arsonists,” to allowing the defendant to pick the names of the jurors through a raffle, Schroeder raised many concerns about the direction in which the trial was headed before it even started.

Judge Schroeder exhibited several signs of unprofessionalism. He played a game of “Jeopardy!” with the potential jurors and made a speech with racial undertones as to why he had defendants blindly pick the names of the jurors.

One of the charges legal experts thought would most likely get Rittenhouse some time in prison for – possession of a dangerous weapon – was dismissed by Schroeder after the defense found a “legal loophole,” which only prevented minors from owning short-barrelled rifles. That law is adopted in Wisconsin, and Kyle’s rifle was an AR-15, a long-barrelled rifle.

The courtroom under Schroeder was unbelievably chaotic, with an unusual amount of shouting, putting his professionalism up for question.

And lastly, during the cross-examination, the judge’s phone rang to the ringtone of “God Bless the USA.” The song is a patriotic song popular among conservatives in the US and was used many times as Donald Trump’s entrance theme during his rallies, which also reflected the judge’s most probable political stance towards the cause for which Huber and Rosenbaum died – BLM. 

Kyle Rittenhouse

The murderous teenager did not shy away from putting his complexion and white tears to use, as they must have garnered the judge and the jury’s sympathy, especially that his skin color matched theirs.

Kyle played the victim card shortly after getting on the stand, on which he shed crocodile tears and claimed Rosenbaum had “ambushed” him, arguing self-defense. 

The judge gave Rittenhouse a 10-minute break to compose himself. But were his victims given a break before he shot them? 

Kyle’s testimony saw him reiterating what he said during the aforementioned interview before the attack. He also argued self-defense when it came to his murder of two men and the wounding of a third. “I did nothing wrong,” he boldly claimed.

There isn’t much to address in Kyle’s testimony, for in the court, he was not the one at fault as much as the defense team, the jurors, and the judge, and looking at recordings of the testimony, one could easily predict the defense had coached Rittenhouse on what to say.

All in all, the trial was very disappointing, especially with how the judge was too stern against the prosecution while being too lenient in favor of the defense and, well, the end result, Kyle’s acquittal.

Celebrating crime

By acquitting Rittenhouse, the US justice system committed a crime against his victims, allowing them to be perceived as terrorists for trying to stop him from putting somebody in harm’s way while designating him a “hero” for “protecting property.”

This goes to show that the justice system in question sees defending property as a valid cause for murder while perceiving protesting against systemic racism and police brutality as a crime.

Rittenhouse went on to become an icon for the far-right in the United States, those of them who oppose Black Lives Matter and the protests that went on calling for racial equality. Those who want to have guns in their holsters all the time in case “the government tries to oppress them” do not want others to protest because of the same reason: government-sponsored oppression. 

Kyle garnered support from the radical right in America and its leaders, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene went as far as pushing for rewarding Kyle a gold Congressional Gold Medal for “protecting the community of Kenosha, Wisconsin, during a Black Lives Matter (BLM) riot on August 25, 2020.” Not only that, but GOP congressmen have offered Rittenhouse an internship following this fiasco, seeing him as some sort of validation for their conservative cause.

Those congressmen include Rep. Madison Cawthorn, Rep. Lauren Boebert, and Rep. Matt Gaetz.

The American right went out on protests to support Kyle Rittenhouse, surprisingly not solely because of his race but because to them, his acquittal was a tool they could use to champion “gun rights” in a country where gun-related killings constitute 73% of all homicides.

Finally, when Donald Trump, a man notorious for his racism and obstruction of justice, not only congratulates you but hosts you in his resort in Florida in celebration, you’re probably in the wrong.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!

Critical Race Theory and America’s Fear of Reality

 November 22, 2021 

by Lawrence Davidson

Part I—Reality and the Mind

Here is a story of a clash of ideas between two 18th-century thinkers, the Anglican Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753) and litterateur/curmudgeon Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). At this time, there was an argument over the nature of reality. Berkeley argued that what we know of reality is limited to the ideas the mind derives from our senses. It is not that there is no reality external to us, it is just that we can’t know it in and of itself. We can only be aware of it (including features such as solidity) as sensory impressions. This was misunderstood by folks like Johnson, who thought Berkeley was denying an  external, material world. He famously told his friend and biographer James Boswell that “I refute him [Berkeley] thus” and kicked a stone. 

Despite Johnson’s scorn, there is room to draw lessons from Berkeley’s insight. Almost all of us mingle belief with reality. That is, we assume that the ideas in our heads reflect reality faithfully. Most of the time the two do correspond well enough, at least at a mundane level, for us to get through our day. But the correspondence is not there all of the time, and this fact can get us into trouble. Yet, so powerful is the assumed melding of perception and reality that we rarely bother kicking the stone—which here stands in for seeking objective evidence of that apparent connection. Instead, we go with first impressions, automatically accept community or peer group judgments, or are committed to misleading ideologies. Having done so, confirmation bias sets in and we downgrade any suggestion that our views are inaccurate. 

If one is interested in examples of these sorts of problems, there are a number of good books to consult. One classic is Irving L. Janis, Victims of Groupthink (Houghton Mifflin,1972). Janis looks at such historical incidents as Kennedy’s decision to support the Bay of Pigs invasion and the misbeliefs that contributed to the U.S. war in Vietnam. One should also take a look at Madeleine L. Van Hecke, Blind Spots (Prometheus Books, 2007), which takes up such topics as thoughtlessness, “my-side bias,” and “trapped by categories.”

Part II—Critical Race Theory, Part 1

Today, we have an ongoing example of what happens when you mistake the ideas in your head for reality. It is the controversy that rages due to a purposefully distorted and fear-driven misrepresentation of critical race theory (CRT). CRT began as a field of academic study. This actually honed its accuracy as a social critique because, within the academic setting, it itself was open to critical analyses based on logic and evidence. What the theory posits is that, despite the reality that all human beings are biologically the same, “racism is institutionalized and is embedded in America’s history, legal systems, and policies.” 

There is plenty of historical evidence for this. The process of institutionalization began quite early. The U.S. Constitution, as originally promulgated, legalized slavery. That status lasted into the 1860s, by which time racial bias and discrimination were accepted aspects of white society. Even after slavery was officially done away with, popular racist attitudes stood firm. Thus, following a brief period of “reconstruction,” the federal government turned a blind eye to state-based laws and practices that affirmed the continuing legal nature of racial discrimination. That official myopia lasted until the 1960s.

Thus, for most of the country’s history, over 200 years, racism was an expression of the white majority’s belief in non-white, and especially Black, inferiority. Such a long-embedded belief system does not go away easily. Indeed, a more common move is to defend it as part of sacred tradition. Therefore it is, even today, an element in the American psyche. On this basis, CRT “critiques how institutionalized racism [still] perpetuates a caste system [white privilege] that is inherently unequal.”

Despite the relative ease with which CRT’s claims can be defended using an objective reading of U.S. history, it remains both disturbing and confusing to most white Americans. For instance, many conservative white people dismiss CRT as a cover for the failure of those Black Americans to better themselves by their own efforts. These conservatives point to their own immigrant ancestors, many of whom were unofficially discriminated against yet “made it” to a comfortable middle-class life. While there is some truth to these immigrant stories, the comparison they engender is a false one. The mostly European ancestors of white Americans were never legally enslaved, were not systematically discriminated against via legalized racist practices lasting for multiple generations, and thus were relatively quickly able to assimilate into the dominant white society. 

Some liberal white Americans have an even harder time with CRT. They often regard themselves as personally free of racism. They resent being seen as part of society’s racist problem by virtue of a white privilege they neither chose nor could have avoided. Structured into the institutions of their society, white privilege was simply there for them when they were born. 

Part III—Critical Race Theory, Part 2

A reaction to CRT based on emotion has caused it to become a major point of public contention in the nation’s never-ending culture war. Here is an example. On Tuesday, 2 November 2021, I went to vote for a number of local elected offices, including school board membership. As I was walking to the poll building, a woman came up and, shoving a flyer at me, said I must vote for this write-in candidate because she is “against teaching CRT to our children.” I asked her to explain CRT to me. She said, “I don’t know much about it” but showed me an handout allegedly used in a public school that traced episodes of institutional racism in the U.S. in the 20th century. When I pointed out to her that, as far as I could tell, the examples were all historically accurate she got flustered and declared, “It’s politics. We have to keep politics out of the classroom.” When I suggested that the decision by a school board to censor history is a political one, she turned around and walked away. A certain idea of CRT had taken residence in her head and resulted in the distortion of reality. She obviously never bothered to “kick the stone” in order to get at the truth of the matter.

This sort of episode is not unique. The syndicated columnist Will Bunch, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer of 7 November 2021, pointed out that in the recent Virginia governor’s election (won by the Republican candidate) “a surprisingly large number of Virginians [25% of voters] said they were energized [to vote Republican] by the out-of-nowhere rise of the perceived issue of critical race theory.” Bunch goes on to explain that a twisted notion of CRT has come to stand in for how the issue of racism is taught in the schools. He also noted that this same distorted notion is presented nightly by “Fox TV’s race-baiter-in-chief Tucker Carlson,” who also recently confessed “I’ve never figured out what critical race theory is, to be totally honest, after a year of talking about it.” Bunch concludes that the high-anxiety response to the idea of CRT in the schools is based on the fear that white children are being seduced away from “a traditional [white-dominated] American way of life.”

We can compare Will Bunch’s outlook with that of Marc Thiessen, a syndicated columnist who represents the hard right. How hard? Thiessen learned his trade as a speechwriter for George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, both arguably war criminals responsible for the unnecessary U.S. invasion of Iraq. 

Thiessen’s columns also appear in the Philadelphia Inquirer, and one concerning CRT was published on 12 November 2021. He also focuses on the Virginia voters’ concerns about race education in the schools. He sees as legitimate the fears and anger of some parents in Virginia’s Loudoun County  because the local teachers were allegedly exposed to CRT during a series of inservice sessions run by Equity Collaborative, (EC). EC is “a national consulting firm focused on helping schools, school systems, and youth development organizations create educational equity.” Thiessen accuses EC of using CRT to teach that “racism is an inherent part of American civilization.” He does not challenge the accuracy of CRT’s view, but assumes it is, in any case, a scandalous proposition promoting the notion that even the American school systems support “systematic oppression.” Thiessen cites support for his charge using isolated quotes and the complaints of parents upset with CRT. EC has taken note of the charges and responded with a posting on its web site which describes its activities in Loudoun County and the concepts that were taught to the teachers attending their sessions. 

Thiessen is also upset by what he describes as the “Left’s denial” that CRT is being taught to children in the schools. He says that the denial is “intellectually dishonest.” How so? Well, he asserts that America’s children are being instructed by teachers “trained in CRT to see everything through the prism of race.” He compares it to having all schoolchildren taught by “teachers trained in Marxist thought.” The truth is that most teachers report that they are not being pressured to integrate CRT into the curriculum, nor do they want it to be. As we will see below, these attitudes reflect the nation’s

tensions.

So Thiessen is wrong. CRT is not being pushed onto K-12 faculty or students. In fact, for most of the nation’s history, school systems have been doing just the opposite. Take a look at the interview with the historian Donald Yacovone published recently in the Harvard Gazette. Yacovone is an expert on the presentation of Black America in U.S. textbooks. He explains that the issues of slavery and subsequent discrimination and segregation of Black Americans were largely absent from textbooks and school lessons until the 1960s. “In the mid-1960s, textbooks began to change because attitudes and scholarship were changing in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement.” However, Yacovone points out that “even when textbooks are accurate, teachers have to be willing to teach it. We know there are many white teachers who are afraid of doing it. And you have to have school systems, both public and private, committed to doing this work and not to punish teachers for doing so.” He concludes that today such punishment is being carried out or threatened. Certainly this punitive approach was favored by some parents and educational administrators in Virginia.

Could it be that the backlash described by Will Bunch in Virginia is part of the effort to prevent teachers and school systems from teaching an accurate portrayal of the historical and contemporary influence of race in American society? And could it be that Marc Thiessen favors that suppression?

Part IV—Conclusion

There can be little doubt that traditional white America has always been deeply racist. As Yacovone concludes, “white supremacy precedes the origins of the United States. Every aspect of social interaction, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries, was dominated by white identity, and white supremacy became an expression of American identity.” 

This attitude persisted without effective challenge for over 200 years. That was plenty of time for socially contrived beliefs about white supremacy to dominate over the reality of a shared human status of all races. A challenge (the kicking of the stone) finally came in the 1960s when a successful alliance of black and white progressives temporarily marshaled the political power to overcome racist resistance at the state and federal government levels. The result was the enactment of laws that banned discrimination in the public realm. However, a decade of progressive political victories could not be sustained on a foundation of 200 years of racist tradition, and by the 1980s a pushback by conservative whites began. We are still experiencing that effort today.

That pushback has exacerbated tempers in an already divided nation. Unlike those capable of original thinking, such as Berkeley and Johnson, the average person sees his environment largely through community or peer group judgments and ideologies. It is groupthink that is comfortable for most, so no fact checking seems necessary. However, CRT is just that: fact checking. The result is a potentially effective challenge to assumptions that rationalize white privilege. And the result of that is school board meetings with parents screaming their heads off.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!

The Democracy vs. Freedom Dispute

July 1, 2021 

by Lawrence Davidson

Part I—Democracy and Freedom

In the United States, there is a dispute over whether democracy and freedom are compatible. Some, such as Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, have questioned their compatibility, and even asserted that freedom, rather than democracy, is what the U.S. really stands for. These terms are often used out of context and the dispute often suffers from a lack of historical knowledge, but there is nothing surprising about that. 

Most of the men who put together the U.S. Constitution saw the world in class, racial and gender terms. While they wanted a more democratic government than that in England which, for propaganda purposes, they had portrayed as a tyranny, the new American democracy had to be carefully structured. Here is how this translated from theory into practice: the common man’s passions should be held in check by a system that kept the power to make policy in the hands of those white males who had “a material stake in society”—that is, the propertied class. For large segments of the population democracy was to be denied due to both gender and color. 

Only a relative few of these men were thinking about freedom per se. And those who did, certainly did not define it in open-ended libertarian terms. Indeed, in late 18th century America, freedom came in two flavors: (1) first and foremost, the freedom from “unreasonable” taxation. What is unreasonable in this sense, would be argued about incessantly right up into the present. (2) Protection against the abuse of government power. The notion of abuse was directly connected to a) examples of alleged British excesses leading up to the American Revolution and b) Federalist party practices (when in power) like the suppression of critical newspapers and pamphlets. It is to cover a host of these sorts of issues, collectively posited as the protection of individual rights or freedoms, that Jefferson and Madison insisted a bill of rights be added to the Constitution as its first set of amendments. Once this was accomplished (December 1791) America’s democracy and a constitutional list of protected rights/freedoms, became compatible. 

Part II—Getting Things Wrong 

Now we fast forward to the present and Republican Senator Rand Paul, who was recently quoted in the New York Times as follows: “The idea of democracy and majority rule really is what goes against our history and what the country stands for [which is freedom]. The Jim Crow laws came out of democracy. That’s what you get when a majority ignores the rights of others.” He goes on to connect Republican Party opposition to a bipartisan congressional investigation of the January 6 “protest” (it was really an attempted insurrection) with the right of the political minority to protect itself against the majority. All of this is ahistorical and illogical. 

When taking up Paul’s position there are several points to consider:

First: Historical accuracy. Paul seems confused about the status of majority and minority when it comes to freed slaves in the American South at the time Congress abandoned Reconstruction (March 1877). At this time, the Black population in large parts of the rural South constituted the numerical majority. So, the Jim Crow laws that quickly followed were the products of a local political/racial minority (southern Whites) seeking to suppress the newly won rights of their local majorities (southern Blacks). Thus, Paul has his facts backwards. He might have made this mistake because he thinks that the American Black population has been a minority at all times and in all places throughout the country’s history. Yet here we have an important exception—an exception that challenges the senator’s argument that discriminatory behavior principally has its source with oppressive majorities.

Today, if Senator Paul is looking for a minority in need of protection, he should focus on contemporary southern Blacks (who are now indeed a minority both in size and power.) They are now faced with a white Republican Party in control of state legislatures seeking to suppress the voting access of minorities.

Second. Paul seems not to take into consideration that the American majority has grown and diversified. In other words, when it comes to what the government (local, state and federal) cannot do to you (like suppress your voting rights)—the you have steadily grown larger. Theoretically this should bode ill for the rightwing state legislatures mentioned above. It is unclear how Senator Paul personally feels about this (such narrowing of the election laws has not taken place in his home state of Kentucky), but he is an active member of the Republican Party, and that is party playing fast and loose with the voting laws in a host of southern and mid-western states. Why is the Republican Party doing this? Because a growing and diversifying majority creates a growing number of voters and most come from Black and other non-white segments of the population. Exercising their participatory political rights, they tend to vote Democrat. 

Third. The constitutionally protected rights or freedoms are not open-ended. Yet Paul seems to suggest that they are when he asserts that to protect the Republican minority in the Senate, the party can block a bipartisan investigation of the January 6 insurrection. On the one hand, it is quite true that the bill of rights was designed as, and remains, a necessary defense of individual rights from majority demands for political or cultural uniformity. On the other, one can ask, what is Paul and the Republicans trying to protect their party from? The bill of rights does not, and never was supposed to stifle investigation of criminal acts. The only thing the bill of rights does in this regard is to guard the individual against illegal evidence gathering procedures and other abusive practices on the part of law enforcement.

Part III—Misusing the Bill of Rights

Against this background, how are we to understand Paul’s specific application of minority rights? At the very least, we can understand it as a misinterpretation of the purpose and intent of the bill of rights and the protections it offers individual citizens. In other words, he is defending his party’s refusal to allow a bipartisan investigation of an apparent crime—a crime with potentially embarrassing trail of evidence.

The Republican Party and its conspiracy-spinning allies in the press and social media (whose speech is nonetheless protected) essentially created an alternate reality for millions of Americans that led some of them to insurrection. Despite many evidence-based demonstrations to the contrary, millions have bought into the myth that former President Donald Trump was cheated—and thus they, his supporters, were also cheated—out of victory in the 2020 presidential election. While both the Republicans and their supporters may believe the unbelievable—aver the demonstrably false—they have no right under the Constitution and its bill of rights to express such a delusion by going on a rampage, destroying public property, and attacking public officials. They have no protected right—no “freedom” to do this even if they claim, probably truthfully, that they believed the president told them to do it. 

Taking the next step, what is the real-world consequence of Paul’s defense? Well, given the likelihood that the investigation would connect elements of the Republican Party to the actions of the insurrectionists, this must be seen as self-serving obstruction of justice—itself a crime. For Paul, this is the “freedom” that—conveniently—supersedes democracy. 

Finally, the whole affair is a scary example of a paradox: The protection of speech, that is the right to free speech, can  degenerate into a campaign of lies and this can easily lead people to unprotected, that is criminal, actions. This is, admittedly, a downside of the bill of rights. An individual (and keep in mind that under U.S. law corporations are seen as individuals) has a protected right to lie to the public—to wit: broadcasted fantasies ranging from those of the National Inquirer to Fox TV and, lest we forget, Donald Trump.

Part IV—Conclusion

It is worth repeating that one of the positive things about the political evolution of the United States is that it has expanded the ranks of the participatory majority. In political terms, citizens of all genders and races now have both participatory rights and protected individual rights. Correspondingly, the minority—referring here specifically to those who object to this historical expansion—is slowly shrinking. While the latter’s rights to, say free speech, will remain protected, their ability to retain political and cultural power may well diminish over time. There is no doubt that the Republican leadership has a sense of this possibility, and this accounts for their increasingly fierce and frenzied attempts to turn back the clock. 

The shift of emphasis from an expanding democracy with protected individual rights/freedoms, to a dangerously ad hoc and sometimes illogical version of freedom, is part of that frenzied activity. Senator Paul and his friends, very short on historical facts and judgment, want all of us to believe in the absurd. That is, obstruction of justice in the name of minority rights is “what the country stands for.”

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!