Politically selective prosecution
The way things are supposed to work in our country, people shouldn’t be punished selectively. Their politics should be largely irrelevant to their prosecution nor should who they are or what they stand for prevent it if prosecution is warranted.
That’s the ideal situation, at least.
In reality, prosecutors use all kinds of criteria to determine who gets prosecuted and who doesn’t. Sometimes, that’s informed by the DA’s politics. A conservative “tough on crime” type might prosecute someone that a more liberal DA would let walk, for example.
But again, as long as the defendant’s politics don’t play into things, I don’t have an issue with that. District attorneys are voted on, after all, and people deserve what they vote for.
In Manhattan, however, DA Alvin Bragg isn’t trying to be subtle. He’s blatantly allowing his politics to expressly determine who gets prosecuted and who doesn’t.
For example, we all know about Trump’s prosecution for a crime that makes absolutely no sense. Bragg distorted the law and likely only got a conviction because of an equally biased judge. The idea that an internal accounting error, at worst, is fraud was stupid beyond belief.
Then there’s the flip side, where now people feel betrayed by Bragg over who he didn’t prosecute.
Dozens of protesters swarmed Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office building Monday to rip him for nixing charges against members of the anti-Israel mob that attacked Columbia University — calling the move “a betrayal.”
The demonstrators said that letting many of the rampaging protesters off scot-free sets “a strikingly dangerous precedent” — and called on the US Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute the crimes if the lefty DA won’t.
“What Alvin Bragg is saying to all New Yorkers who follow the law is if you conceal your identity, if you harass Jews long enough, if you break property, if you take maintenance workers hostage, if you do that, you will not be prosecuted,” seethed activist protester and Harvard University grad student Shabbos Kestenbaum.
“That is un-American. That is antisemitic. And that is unacceptable in the great city of New York.”
Let’s remember that the mob at Columbia wasn’t just antisemitic. Being antisemitic is constitutionally protected, after all.
Oh no, they were violent. They assaulted individuals, held people in buildings against their will, and took over entire buildings. They destroyed university property as well.
These are real crimes that don’t require the mental contortionism Bragg engaged in when going after Trump, and yet he opted not to prosecute them. Why?
The obvious answer is that they held the right politics.
Bragg can try to explain it however he wants, but the protesters at Columbia are progressives pushing a progressive narrative and that’s something he has no interest in prosecuting, even if they were violent in doing so.
Meanwhile, Trump paid someone to keep their mouth shut and Bragg bends over backward trying to make it a campaign finance issue, thus justifying other charges being brought against the former president.
This is nothing but Bragg being politically selective about who he goes after. If you’re a good progressive in Manhattan, so long as you’re serving the cause, you could probably murder someone and get away with it so long as Bragg is on the job.
On the flip side, if you accidentally drop a piece of paper while advocating for a right-leaning cause, you’d better expect Bragg to try and throw the book at you.
Look, I value free speech above almost anything else. I also think that engaging in objectionable speech like antisemitism should be protected. You must protect unpopular speech like this.
However, one’s right to free speech doesn’t give them free rein to do whatever they want. Columbia is a private university, meaning their land is private property. If they say to knock it off, they have a right to expect people to knock it off. In a public park across the street? That’s a different matter.
Yet this wasn’t a simple protest. These twerps essentially took over a part of the campus, forbid people to pass through it unless in service to the cause and thus treated it like it was their property, then took over additional property and destroyed other property, assaulted individuals and denied them their civil liberties, and that’s just the stuff I specifically remember.
And Bragg elected to do nothing to them.
Nothing at all.
Everything about this is disgusting, but then again, Bragg is a disgusting individual. His every action as district attorney has been one of politically-motivated hackery. He’s making life less safe for any number of law-abiding New Yorkers and he’s patting himself on the back over it.
Sure, the people of Manhattan deserve to get what they voted for good and hard, but there are a lot of people who didn’t vote for it who are going to be getting it just as hard. That’s where I have a problem.
What’s funny is how the people of Manhattan like to look down on folks from the South as if we’re inferior. If this is what superiority looks like, then I’ll take downhome any day of the week and twice on Sundays.
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