It’s a tale of two standards. One is represented by Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann walking out of a D.C. federal court, freed by a jury that included three Clinton campaign donors. Weathermen terrorist Bill Ayers’s post-acquittal line “Guilty as sin, free as a bird” could come to mind.
The other standard is represented by elderly former Donald Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro being arrested at an airport, shock-and-awe style, for resisting a congressional subpoena, a “crime” that media generally shrug off when Democrats do it.
It’s justice, Venezuela-style, and it “sends an an unmistakable message,” writes the Federalist’s Ben Weingarten: “We can get you anytime, anywhere, on any grounds we choose. You can’t touch even a single one of ours.”
It might be hard to make this claim — except for one thing: It’s a pattern. Navarro’s fate also befell ex-Trump advisor Roger Stone in 2019. The wizened, white-haired senior citizen was arrested in a predawn raid at his Florida home by dozens of FBI agents, clad in tactical gear and sporting (actual) assault rifles, while CNN, apparently tipped off, filmed the sordid display.
Never mind that all authorities had to do was contact Stone’s and Navarro’s lawyers and have the men surrender themselves, as is customary. The theater is the point: Send a tongue-stifling message to political opponents and give media video that makes your persecuted opponents appear to the public as dangerous criminals. A picture is worth a thousand words, after all.
There are still more examples of this double standard, too. As Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson stated yesterday evening, pointing out that the Democrat Party “has somehow completely taken over our largest law enforcement agency”:
Michael Sussmann is not even the biggest example of this. Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok — all of them lied to the feds as well. That’s a crime. None of them were ever hauled off in leg irons. In fact, they’re now at CNN, MSNBC and Georgetown, respectively. They were rewarded with better jobs for what they did…. They always are.
Jim Clapper and John Brennan committed perjury on television before Congress. There’s no dispute about that. What do they do? Oh, they’re on TV now, too. Hunter Biden lied on a federal gun form. That’s a felony. How was he punished? Oh, a mild probing on CBS that he just shrugged off as if it were nothing.
So that’s the actual norm. If you were Tony Podesta and you work for the Democratic Party, you’re totally fine. Nothing you do is going to get you in trouble, and you know it. If you’re Roger Stone, you’ve done nothing wrong at all, but you’ve given the finger to the Democratic Party; they show up at your house with guns. That’s the norm the attorney general is upholding. Serve the Democratic Party, and you’ll be rewarded even if you’re a felon.
At almost exactly the moment the DOJ was putting Peter Navarro in shackles, the DOJ was also dropping the most serious charges against the two left-wing lawyers who tried to incinerate cops, burn them to death in their patrol cars during the BLM riots.
Now, this pair had faced 30 years in jail on terrorism charges, but that was too tough for the Biden DOJ. They’ll be out in a couple, max. Why? Because they’ve got the right politics. And Liz Cheney is not giving you a lecture about [how] people who try to burn police officers to death are a threat to our democracy. No, they’re fine.
Speaking of Cheney, the January 6 political prisoners are still rotting in jail, civil rights violated, essentially for trespassing. Meanwhile, Raz Simone, the “warlord” who in 2020 led the actual Seattle-based insurrection called CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) and was videoed next to his Tesla giving followers AR-15s, apparently hasn’t even been charged with a crime.
Returning to Navarro, there’s another interesting parallel. He was arrested for resisting a subpoena from the January 6 committee, citing, in part, that he’s duty bound to protect President Trump’s executive privilege. Well, 10 years ago then-attorney general Eric Holder was in the same boat: He was, via a bipartisan vote, found in criminal contempt of Congress because he refused to hand over documents relating to how the Obama administration armed Mexican drug cartels. Holder even had his day in court, with a judge evaluating his executive privilege claim and ruling against him. But his wasn’t quite the same boat:
Even after all this, (with)Holder was never arrested.
And could you imagine the media outrage if he, a black man, had been treated like Navarro: publicly put in leg irons and hauled away? Careers would’ve ended.
So what’s really going on here? What’s the big picture? The reality is that there’s no longer “a culture war,” I warned back in 2012 — “What is occurring now is a pacification effort.”
Responding to this, one of my editors concurred, saying that the Left was moving from one societal sector to another stamping out dissent. It can do this because it is the establishment, controlling the culture-shaping mainstream media, academia, entertainment, Big Tech, and virtually all of corporate America.
This pacification effort has intensified, too, metastasizing into the political correctness 2.0 called “wokeness.” At a recreational event the end of last week, a man told me that his conservative daughter won’t express her views at college for fear of persecution. Multiply this by millions of silenced voices, and the effect is clear: You can’t win a debate when you can’t even join the debate.
It’s not as if being stifled are truly “radical” views, either, such as Marxist or Nazi sentiments (though any deviation from the leftist agenda is labeled the latter), but opposition to radical views such as the notion that children can switch sexes at will.
Yet many of this dark radicalism’s cheerleaders will learn, as the plight of liberals Robert F. Kennedy Jr., J.K. Rowling, and Martina Navratilova evidence, that this iron muzzle will leave no dissenting voice untouched (see Leon Trotsky and Lavrentiy Beria, et al.). So they can see, hear, and speak no evil, but shut eyes today will yield shut mouths tomorrow.
The earlier referenced Tucker Carlson segment, a must-watch, is below.
