I must point out two things — the incredible restraint of the peaceful Black protesters at the scenes of several police killings of unarmed Black citizens SINCE Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murder in an incident Minneapolis police originally headlined “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction.”
The restraint of the Black community seems superhuman to me, at a time when we have a seemingly decent man as the president and now daily police killings of unarmed civilians, disproportionately Black and brown, that police departments in many cases immediately justify in public relations campaigns and do their best to cover up.
The other thing to note is that the Department of Justice was specifically created to bring justice to the victims of racism. It was established pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment that extended the constitutional freedoms of the Bill of Rights to every person born in America, all citizens.
The DOJ was tasked with supervising the states, particularly the former slave states that had taken up arms against the US government, to ensure that former slaves (soon to be victims of a hundred years of variations on the Black Codes, lynching and deprivation of basic rights under “Separate but Equal”) had the constitutional protections of the federal government.
The Supreme Court stepped in, within a few years, to effectively nullify the Fourteenth Amendment, putting it into a judicially induced coma that lasted for almost a century. A political compromise that settled the close 1876 presidential election resulted in the end of Bayonet Rule (federal enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment) and the return of Home Rule, by white supremacist “Redeemers,” the former Confederate leaders.
During that long century of unpunished terrorism there was no federal protection against racist or otherwise oppressive state action, what became known as civil rights violations. Enforcement of all laws was at the discretion of each of the United States, as though the constitution had never been amended by the Fourteenth Amendment.
Nowadays, after a century of blood, activism, organizing and court victories against white supremacist terrorism and racially discriminatory practices across the nation, the Fourteenth Amendment is back. Citizens, since the mid-nineteen sixties, can go to federal court to seek redress of grievances against their state under the constitution, as intended in 1868 when the amendment was added to ensure the rights of citizenship to a new class of citizens..
The Department of Justice, we see, changes, sometimes radically, with every administration. Regard for the spirit and letter of laws enforcing equality of citizens comes and goes with the strong opinions of the Executive.
Trump’s Department of Justice abdicated all federal responsibility for overseeing even overtly racist police departments. Recall the grim determination of Trump’s first Attorney General (followed by his evil second A.G.) to keep American policing strictly in local hands. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (Trump’s first senate supporter, a man deemed too racist to be appointed to the federal bench, imagine that) insisted “it is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement agencies.” The diminutive racist:
made clear he believed policing should be left to local and state law enforcement bodies, no matter how brutally they treated black and other minority citizens supposedly under their protection.
Bagpiper Bill Barr, Trump’s provocative, partisan culture warrior gunsel, who replaced the “weak” and “disloyal” Sessions as Attorney General, agreed 100% and was even more proactive in his partisan and race-baiting attacks. Antifa and Black Lives Matter, he insisted, are the problem (also mail-in ballots were an “obvious” invitation to massive voter fraud), not heavily armed white militias exercising their protected First and Second Amendment rights to resist the tyranny of pandemic precautions, or local and federal police simply doing their best to keep the peace, doing their difficult, thankless jobs in a nation overrun by savage, vicious, terrorist haters.
It should be noted that the fat, pugnacious fuck resigned before the actual insurrectionist “poop” hit the fan in the weeks leading up to Biden’s inauguration. Barr may be enraged at disrespectful liberals, atheists, humanists and so on, but he’s not going to prison behind that rage.
Barr consistently did major damage for his master, spun whatever Trump wanted as perfectly legal and proper and justifiable, using legal quibbles like “material lie” to exonerate Trump allies who’d lied under oath to protect their boss. Other times, Barr was right in your face.
Remember his December 3, 2019 speech at the Department of Justice when he pointedly reminded Black people that if they want police protection, (Barr at his deniable best– he never singled out Black communities by name!), they’d better start respecting and obeying [1] the police.
Today, the American people have to focus on something else, which is the sacrifice and the service that is given by our law enforcement officers. And they have to start showing, more than they do, the respect and support that law enforcement deserves. And if communities don’t give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need.
“Nice little family you got there, shame if anything happened to ’em.” [2]
It is encouraging to have a Justice Department that is now looking into what appears to be a pattern and practice of corrupt and selective prosecutions by the Executive branch under America’s Greatest Winner President, Donald J. Trump, and his smugly bullying gunsel Mr. Barr.
We learn from the recent execution of search warrants against another of Trump’s personal lawyers, that Barr kept a lid on the investigation into Rudy Giuliani’s mad attempts to make money and keep the far right in power by spreading Russian propaganda leading up to the election and meddling in every other possible way. After all, Barr must have reasoned, what’s really the big deal about helping the president in an arguably shady effort Trump wasn’t even convicted for when a politically motivated impeachment was brought against him? More to the point, investigating an ally of the president was absolutely and completely within Barr’s discretion, as top US law enforcement official.
It’s not like Mueller got the truth out of Manafort or Stone in time to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the Trump campaign had been in an actual criminal conspiracy with Russia. We now know that Manafort gave critical polling data to the Russians so they could help Trump win the Electoral College in 2016. We also know Stone, among other unsung services to his far-right colleagues, worked with Wikileaks on the timing of revelations harmful to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Some of us know it, anyway — there are millions who believe the whole thing is a hoax on top of a lying liberal hoax. And that storming the Capitol to stop these election-stealing murderers is more than justifiable, it was patriotic.
God bless these United Shayssssh.
[1]
I know, I know, Barr said “support” not “obey” but these pricks always dogwhistle in easily translatable code.
[2]
I see in finishing the article I got Barr’s quote from, that Adam Serwer (staff writer for The Atlantic) put it even better, in a tweet (from December, 2019, mind you):
Bill Barr, almost verbatim: “nice community you got there. Shame if something happened to it because you said the police shouldn’t murder innocent people.”
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