There Ain’t No Letter to the Law

Here’s a conjectural scenario: A white man named Larry is in his Tesla. The vehicle is traveling down the interstate on autopilot while he enjoys a Harry Potter DVD. Meanwhile, Antifa has blocked the road ahead. Due to a software glitch, the vehicle fails to stop in time. One of the lunatics dies as a result of a 65 mph collision.

If I were a liberal law school professor, I’d fail a student who labels it anything other than premeditated murder. He was driving aggressively towards peaceful protesters before he rammed an angelic young woman with blue hair and wielding a hammer. Terrorism experts concur that white supremacists like Larry often purchase Teslas for the purpose of killing anti-racist activists. We know he had white supremacist intent because investigators found Fox News on his phone.

The letter of the law makes it impossible to contextualize where we’re at as a nation. An observer from a sane, hypothetical country would find himself perplexed that things proscribed by the law (blocking roads and attacking cars) are quite clearly legal, while attempting to escape is prosecuted as aggression by the panicked driver who had the option to either plow through the mob or subject himself to its mercy.

In order to figure out what’s going on, I’d recommend he start by reading this NYT article from last year. Here’s two excerpts:

James Fields Jr., the white supremacist who murdered a woman two summers ago when he steered a Dodge Challenger into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators in Charlottesville, Va., was sentenced Friday to life in federal prison.

“This was calculated, it was coldblooded, it was motivated by this deep-seated racial animus,” Thomas T. Cullen, the United States attorney for the Western District of Virginia, said after the sentence was announced. He said the case set a precedent for future instances of domestic terrorism.

For Mr. Hypothetical, it’d be a surreal experience to read what the NYT said happened and then watch what actually happened. For an American, it would just be any day of the week at this point. Cullen received a federal judgeship from the Trump Administration as a reward for prosecuting guys who got attacked by Antifa. He was absolutely correct about the case setting a precedent.

We’ve now got conflagrations much worse than Charlottesville occurring all over the country and terrified drivers are getting slapped with insane charges just like Fields. According to USA Today, there have been 104 “ramming incidents” since the George Floyd Memorial Campaign of Carnage began.

For the federal government, this isn’t a problem at all. Every road block has the potential to become a white supremacist domestic terror attack that’s useful for bolstering statistics. However, it’s less than ideal for the average American because he can be attempting to drive from point A to B and find himself either hit with a string of felonies or something more physical like a brick.

There’s an underlying logic of escalation that doesn’t portend well if the election results get contested next month. We went from Charlottesville to George Floyd. What’s next? There isn’t a single political, demographic, cultural or economic trend suggesting any of this will calm down.

Tom Shackleford

I’m proud to officially announce my candidacy for the office of Dogcatcher.