“It is about brute force” rather than “all this bull**** about the law and facts,” said the now-disbarred attorney who faces criminal charges related to an attempted $600 million shakedown of Chevron oil company. Yet this man, Steven Donziger, nonetheless seems to be the Democrats’ kind of guy. In fact, some want to see him rehabilitated so he can scheme again.
As the Daily Wire reports:
Congressional Democrats are asking Attorney General Merrick Garland to intervene in a criminal case against a lawyer found to have falsified scientific evidence and bribed a foreign judge to shake down an oil company, with one member of “The Squad” heralding him as an inspiration for “others to fight back against corporate power.”
Evidence indicates that Steven Donziger and his team ran an elaborate legal fraud that included secretly paying a Latin American court’s independent expert to twist science about pollution and ultimately bribing a judge to issue a multi-billion dollar judgment in their favor.
Donziger has nonetheless found support from celebrities, media, and members of Congress, raising the question of whether Democrats support obstruction of justice and the falsification of science if it serves their agenda.
I didn’t know that was still a question, but I guess you learn something new every day.
And here’s another thing some can learn: Even big corporations can be victims. After all, “Chevron didn’t pollute anything at all, [sic] all the oil biggie did was buy Texaco which in turn had partnered with the Ecuadorean state oil company from 1964 to 1990, before pulling up stakes, cleaning up, getting a clean bill of health from the Ecuadorean government, and leaving,” writes commentator Monica Showalter. “There was oil pollution that came later. The Ecuadorean state oil monopoly remained, polluting the way all state-owned enterprises do. But Chevron remained an easy to shake down target for the left, and Donziger liked to think big.”
Yes, he apparently attended the Michael Avenatti School of Law. (You know, the guy who liberals far and wide thought would make a great presidential candidate — until it was discovered that he could be a sociopath and stole money from a handicapped client.)
Showalter also tells us that Donziger’s shakedown was actually “higher than $8 billion at some points of the drama.” “Drama” may be the right word, too, as a U.S. federal judge in New York found in 2014 — “and detailed in nearly 500 pages of specifics — that it [the judgment] was secured through lies and corruption so astonishing that they were like something ‘out of Hollywood,’” the Wire further informs.
There’s much more detail on Donziger’s transgressions, and I recommend you read all of the Wire’s and Showalter’s articles. But despite the man’s wicked, sociopathic behavior, some Democrats are circling the wagons. To quote the Wire again:
In April, six members of Congress, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), sent a letter to Garland asking for what seems like political interference in the judicial branch, saying the already extensively-litigated case “involved urgent environmental justice concerns of Indigenous people.”
Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) said Donziger’s “bravery and brilliance will inspire others to fight back against corporate power.”
On May 26, actress Susan Sarandon said “the shared enemy is Climate Change and Pollution, not human rights lawyers, the afflicted peoples around the world, or their advocates.”
Donziger’s attitude, apparently shared by his defenders, is that the end justifies the means. His end isn’t hard to figure out, either. He once described his business as the making of “f***ing money,” the Wire also relates.
Moreover, he once told a documentary crew that his Chevron shakedown was “‘about brute force’ rather than ‘all this bullshit about the law and facts.’”
Some may think this attitude would deter Donziger’s high-profile Democrat defenders; on the contrary, however, it to them may be a selling point. In fact, it reflects a standard leftist mindset, one The New Criterion dubbed “Leninthink” in a 2019 essay.
Just consider the following passage from it, which explores Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin’s contempt for Truth:
Opponents objected that Lenin lied without compunction, and it is easy to find quotations in which he says — as he did to the Bolshevik leader Karl Radek — “Who told you a historian has to establish the truth?” Yes, we are contradicting what we said before, he told Radek, and when it is useful to reverse positions again, we will. Orwell caught this aspect of Leninism: “Oceania was at war with Eastasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”
And yet the concept of “lying,” if one stops there, does not reach the heart of the matter. In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy remarks that, contrary to appearances, the hero was not a toady. Rather, he “was attracted to people of high station as a fly is drawn to the light.” A toady decides to toady, but Ivan Ilyich had no need to make such a decision. In much the same way, a true Leninist does not decide whether to lie. He automatically says what is most useful, with no reflection necessary. That is why he can show no visible signs of mendacity, perhaps even pass a lie detector test. La Rochefoucauld famously said that “hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue,” but a true Bolshevik is not even a hypocrite.
Note that one doesn’t have to be a Bolshevik per se or doctrinaire Marxist — that is, someone who’d install a Soviet-style government — for the above to apply. This disregard for Truth epitomizes all hard-core “leftists,” who in reality are better understood as morally disordered people.
Oh, this may not apply to your liberal neighbor (who has his own issues if he’s supporting today’s Democrats). But I’ve been trying to impress upon people for years that vanguard leftists, high-profile politicians in particular, are not normal.
Virtually everyone tells a lie on occasion, but most people still accept that lying is wrong and may only resort to it under “extenuating circumstances” (this isn’t to justify it). But the leftists in question are different.
Detached from moral reality (Truth) and generally contemptuous of the concept, lying is just another tool in leftists’ shed. In fact, many likely don’t even differentiate between lies and Truth; to them there is only the useful and the not so, as the Criterion pointed out.
It’s important to understand this and not, as man will do, project your own mindset onto others. Not knowing thy enemy ensures you’ll become his slave — or worse.
