The Only Crimes Are Political Now

On Wednesday, three teens were arrested for riding e-scooters over an LGBTQ ‘Pride’ mural painted on a crosswalk in Spokane, Washington. One of the teens was charged with a first degree felony and bail was set at $15,000.

On Saturday, in another Washington thousands of miles away, Hamas supporters rioted near the White House. They threw bottles at a park ranger and vandalized national monuments with graffiti reading “Death to America”. Islamic terrorist supporters waved banners and held up signs in support of Hamas. One man in a Hamas headband brandished a bloody Biden mask.

Two Park Police officers were injured in the pro-Hamas violence, but not one arrest was made.

Not a single arrest for the assault on a federal employee (1-20 years in prison), the vandalism of national monuments (10 years in prison) or the support for a terrorist organization (20 years in prison). If only they had done some donuts on a ’Pride’ mural, they might be in jail now.

But as we already learned during the BLM riots and the subsequent eco-riots and Hamas riots, vandalism and even assaulting law enforcement officers is not a crime when done by the right people for the right reasons. Even assaulting Capitol police officers, which up until now has been the only assault on a law enforcement officer that Democrats would condemn, became a victimless crime when Hamas supporters fought police outside Democrat headquarters forcing the evacuation of members of Congress. One of the men slammed a female police officer against a garage door and punched her in the face only to get 48 hours of community service.

Similarly after weeks of antisemitic violence at UCLA, the only serious arrest made was of Edan On, a Jewish high school student, who had been fighting to protect Jewish students after the university allowed Hamas supporters to occupy part of its grounds. Multiple Jewish students and community members had been attacked while campus cops and the LAPD refused to intervene.

CNN however ran a profile “unmasking” the Jewish protesters with a view to getting them arrested rather than any of the Hamas supporters attacking Jews on campus. The 18-year-old’s name now appears as a headline at USA Today, not a single Hamas supporter does.

I have spoken to Jewish community members who were assaulted at UCLA while police watched and refused to do anything, telling them to go down to the station and file a report.

This is the same L.A. in which BLM activists scored millions in police settlements from the BLM riots. And a place where the mayor is a close personal friend of a BLM leader backing the pro-Hamas riots and the Board of Supervisors paid for the defense of UCLA Hamas supporters.

The pattern is everywhere from BLM to J6, from Trump’s arrests to Biden’s pass. Crimes are not defined by laws, but by ideology. Prosecutorial discretion allows the full weight of the law to be brought against political opponents while political supporters will likely not even be arrested.

The evolving shadow legal doctrine that ties it all together is that actual actions, like vandalism or assault, don’t matter, what does matter is their positive or negative political value. A skid mark on a BLM or Pride mural is an act of hate while vandalizing a statue or memorial for BLM or Islamic terrorists is an act of social justice. A protester punching a Capitol police officer has a negative social impact if he is doing it to support Trump, but a positive social impact if he is doing it to support Hamas. And Hamas supporters attacking Jews are fighting for justice while Jews fighting back against them are oppressive Zionist warmongers who must be stopped.

This ‘right side of history’ doctrine is often phrased in subjective language like ‘hate’ or ‘assault on democracy’. These cannot be quantified because they operate purely in the realm of ideological tests. Much as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart defined pornography as “I know it when I see it”, so too his modern counterparts know who gets a pass and who doesn’t.

What they really know is who shares their politics and who doesn’t. So, increasingly, do juries. A system that could rely on jurors to do their jobs even a mere 5 years ago no longer can. Judges and jurors in ultra-leftist areas have, like career professionals including doctors and lawyers, been told that their duty is not to the law, but to upholding their side of the great ideological war.

Ordinary people, like the teens in Spokane, lack the ideological grounding and unexpectedly discover that what in other circumstances was a minor prank is now suddenly a major crime even while they and their parents watch much more horrific crimes being praised on TV.

What is obviously understood by the Potter Stewarts who prosecute, judge and opine about crimes is confusing to the ordinary citizenry who don’t understand why criminals freely roam the streets while the only crimes that the authorities seem to care about are “threats to democracy”.

The notion of what a crime is has been radically redefined in a matter of years.

At the height of BLM madness, violent offenders were set loose while people could be arrested and tried for new crimes like calling the police on a person of the wrong race. DA Bragg in Manhattan, who prosecuted Trump, came into office with a memo not to prosecute armed robbers. Crimes with clear offenses and punishment were no longer prosecuted, but instead convoluted chains of legal reasoning were used by DA Bragg to criminalize Trump’s opposition.

In Washington D.C., whose city council at one point tried to legalize carjacking, the only people who seem to face serious charges anymore are murderers and Republicans. Murder is more likely to be legalized in D.C. than being a political opponent of the radicals in power.

Political segregation effectively means that half the country no longer enjoys civil rights in places like Washington D.C., Los Angeles and New York City. Attacks on them go unpunished while any offense by them, even in self-defense, will mean the harshest possible prison sentences.

Abuses of power that harken back to the worst days of the early Civil Rights era have become routine. Law enforcement knows whom to arrest and whom not to bother arresting. Cops only intervene when the leftist violence is severe enough that it will reflect badly on them. Faced with individual assaults, they rarely bother intervening, collecting evidence or upholding the law. Even when the assaults lead to serious injury, or as in the case of Paul Kessler, a Jewish man assaulted by a terrorist supporter during a pro-Israel rally in California, death.

Prosecutors, many of them progressives or harboring political ambitions, drop cases against leftists while currying favor with the new establishment by throwing the book at their opponents. Judges, especially in areas where they are elected, are just as bad, and jurors are responding to social pressure to punish political and cultural enemies, and spare their own political allies.

Crimes in free countries primarily punish assaults on property and persons while in totalitarian states they primarily punish crimes against the state. Pro-crime policies effectively decriminalized drug offenses, shoplifting and even some violent assaults because punishing crimes against persons and property was seen as upholding a racist and capitalist system.

But the police were never going to be truly defunded and crime was never going to go away. Instead in the last 5 years, crime has come to be defined as a political and social offense, an act of hate, a threat to democracy and an insult to the values and views of the ruling elite.

America’s justice system is being replaced by kangaroo courts and a banana republic system that selectively arrests, prosecutes and convicts political opponents for opposing the regime.

Whether or not something is a crime does not depend on the law, but on the politics of it. There could hardly be a clearer example of it when the day before Hamas supporters staged their attack near the White House. Steve Bannon joined another Trump adviser, Peter Navarro, in being dispatched to prison for contempt of Congress.

Is contempt of Congress a crime? It depends who is in contempt and who is in Congress.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.