High crimes

benfell

Gilead

Competitive authoritarian regime project


Fig. 1. President Lyndon B. Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Clarence Mitchell during signing ceremony of the voting rights act. Yoichi Okamoto, August 6, 1965, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Joe Walsh, “The base of my former political party is fully radicalized. . . .” Twitter, October 18, 2022, https://twitter.com/WalshFreedom/status/1582333001442426881

Donald Trump

Coup attempt


Fig. 1. Department of Justice photograph of seized materials, reportedly partially redacted, via the Washington Post, August 31, 2022,[1] public domain.

Glenn Kirschner, in an interview with Chauncey DeVega:

America has never been willing to hold the ruling-class criminals accountable, whether they are in politics, business, entertainment, the tech business or what have you.[2]

And it’s pretty fucking obvious that Merrick Garland still isn’t.[3] Kirschner continues:

Donald Trump believes that he is above the law. And he holds that belief for good reason. It appears that Trump has lived a life of crime and has never been held accountable. That is a dramatic failing of our criminal justice system, our law enforcement agencies and most certainly our nation’s prosecutors. Trump, in my opinion, has also come to believe, with good reason, that if he admits his crimes out loud people will take a step back and scratch their heads and say, “Geez, I thought it was criminal what he did, but he is saying he did it. So I’m uncomfortable, because that’s not the way we go about investigating and prosecuting crimes in America. Something is wrong here. I don’t know what it is, but we have to figure it out.” In reality, what we as a society need to do is to focus on why Trump and other such people are not being prosecuted.[4]

It is not, of course, just Kirschner saying this; I usually cite Jeffrey Reiman on this topic,[5] but it’s a fairly common observation of the criminal injustice system. In general, as I noted yet again just yesterday, it is the crimes of the poor that are “actually . . . treated as crime, that is, in stark contrast to the crimes of the rich, which cause more damage and kill and injure more people, but are largely treated as civil matters.[6]”

But in the case of Donald Trump, it is also apparent we have an incredibly chickenshit attorney general,[7] who dithered for weeks even on requesting a search warrant,[8] even knowing or having every reason to know that Trump was in possession of extremely sensitive classified materials that were not properly secured.[9] Which is why I’ll believe there are charges against Trump when I actually see charges and not one millisecond before.

For his part, Kirschner believes that Trump will be tried and convicted, but not imprisoned. But he also observes that no prosecutor dares be the first to file charges.[10] It should go without saying that if nobody goes first, then none of those charges will be filed. And with such incredibly chickenshit attorney general, that might just be what happens.

Chauncey DeVega, “‘They are going to convict very quickly’: Glenn Kirschner on the trial of Donald J. Trump,” Salon, October 17, 2022, https://www.salon.com/2022/10/17/they-are-going-to-convict-very-quickly-glenn-kirschner-on-the-trial-of-donald-j/

Academic freedom


Fig. 1. “The Evolution of Intellectual Freedom.” Comic by Jorge Cham, 2011, via Episyllogism[11] fair use.

Ellen Schrecker explains that the root of academia’s difficulties lies in the anti-war and liberation movement protests of the 1960s and early 1970s, provoking a backlash that has lasted into the present day. This backlash is an unsubtle attack on academic freedom.[12]

For the next 50 years [following the 1970s], higher education confronted a toxic combination of reduced public funding and diminished public legitimacy. American politics had turned to the right. Threatened by the social movements of the 1960s as well as by the economic crises of the 1970s, political elites abandoned the liberalism of the New Deal and Great Society and instead embraced the free market. By the 1980s, an increasingly conservative political culture prioritized personal success over the common good.

Higher education came to be seen primarily as a vehicle for individual economic mobility. And as the academy’s demographic make-up changed, public sentiment turned against devoting resources to help individuals who should be helping themselves — especially if those individuals were no longer white men. Instead of making a case for a more democratic system that would offer all qualified applicants access to a high-quality system of universal higher education, the academy’s leaders adopted the individualistic mantra of neoliberalism.[13]

This is something I’ve written about previously.[14] And if you want to know why I condemn neoliberalism so vociferously, why I take neoliberalism so personally, why I think neoliberalism is at least partly responsible for my job situation, consider that even if I had somehow overcome the calamity of the academic job market,[15] if I had somehow overcome the difficulty of holding a Ph.D. in a now-dead field (human science), if I had overcome the difficulty of holding a Ph.D. in a field related to the social sciences, which are saturated with their own Ph.D.s., this is overwhelmingly likely to have been what I would have faced:

Enrollments increased, at least for a time [as universities emphasized science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)], but the size of the faculty did not. When tenured professors retired, they were replaced by part-time and temporary teachers at wages that were often less than those in the fast-food industry. Now nearly 75 percent of the instruction at colleges and universities is in the hands of exploited and insecure, but highly trained and often devoted, faculty members who lack the time and resources to give students the attention they need.[16]

This is why, for me, neoliberalism is personally unforgivable.

Ellen Schrecker, “The 50-Year War on Higher Education,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 14, 2022, https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-50-year-war-on-higher-education

  1. [1]Devlin Barrett, “Justice Dept. says Trump team may have hidden, moved classified papers,” Washington Post, August 31, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/31/trump-documents-removed-storage-room/↩
  2. [2]Glenn Kirschner, quoted in Chauncey DeVega, “‘They are going to convict very quickly’: Glenn Kirschner on the trial of Donald J. Trump,” Salon, October 17, 2022, https://www.salon.com/2022/10/17/they-are-going-to-convict-very-quickly-glenn-kirschner-on-the-trial-of-donald-j/↩
  3. [3]David Benfell, “It is now even more urgently orange jumpsuit time,” Not Housebroken, October 13, 2022, https://disunitedstates.org/2022/08/24/it-is-now-even-more-urgently-orange-jumpsuit-time/↩
  4. [4]Glenn Kirschner, quoted in Chauncey DeVega, “‘They are going to convict very quickly’: Glenn Kirschner on the trial of Donald J. Trump,” Salon, October 17, 2022, https://www.salon.com/2022/10/17/they-are-going-to-convict-very-quickly-glenn-kirschner-on-the-trial-of-donald-j/↩
  5. [5]Jeffrey Reiman, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, 7th ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2004).↩
  6. [6]Steven E. Barkan, Criminology: A Sociological Understanding, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006).; Jeffrey Reiman, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, 7th ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2004).↩
  7. [7]David Benfell, “It is now even more urgently orange jumpsuit time,” Not Housebroken, October 13, 2022, https://disunitedstates.org/2022/08/24/it-is-now-even-more-urgently-orange-jumpsuit-time/↩
  8. [8]Sadie Gurman and Aruna Viswanatha, “Merrick Garland Weighed Search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago for Weeks,” Wall Street Journal, August 15, 2022, https://www.wsj.com/articles/merrick-garland-weighed-search-of-trumps-mar-a-lago-for-weeks-11660601292↩
  9. [9]Devlin Barrett, “Justice Dept. says Trump team may have hidden, moved classified papers,” Washington Post, August 31, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/31/trump-documents-removed-storage-room/; Devlin Barrett and Josh Dawsey, “Trump worker told FBI about moving Mar-a-Lago boxes on ex-president’s orders,” Washington Post, October 12, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/10/12/maralago-witness-trump-boxes-moved/; Devlin Barrett and Perry Stein, “Mar-a-Lago affidavit says many witnesses interviewed, 184 classified files returned in January,” Washington Post, August 26, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/26/trump-affidavit-released/; Eric Tucker, “Trump search inventory released, reveals new details on docs,” Associated Press, September 2, 2022, https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-mar-a-lago-government-and-politics-6bd103a8e418166b17a34d77e8d9102d; Jan Wolfe, Alex Leary, and Sadie Gurman, “Mar-a-Lago Boxes Had More Than 700 Pages of Classified Papers, National Archives Letter Says,” Wall Street Journal, August 23, 2022, https://www.wsj.com/articles/letter-to-trump-lawyer-highlights-national-archives-concern-over-sensitive-materials-before-mar-a-lago-search-11661271403↩
  10. [10]Chauncey DeVega, “‘They are going to convict very quickly’: Glenn Kirschner on the trial of Donald J. Trump,” Salon, October 17, 2022, https://www.salon.com/2022/10/17/they-are-going-to-convict-very-quickly-glenn-kirschner-on-the-trial-of-donald-j/↩
  11. [11]Bob Lane, “Academic Freedom,” Episyllogism, November 3, 2016, https://boblane.com/2016/11/03/academic-freedom/↩
  12. [12]Ellen Schrecker, “The 50-Year War on Higher Education,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 14, 2022, https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-50-year-war-on-higher-education↩
  13. [13]Ellen Schrecker, “The 50-Year War on Higher Education,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 14, 2022, https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-50-year-war-on-higher-education↩
  14. [14]David Benfell, “‘Private benefit’ versus ‘public good,’” Not Housebroken, June 7, 2021, https://disunitedstates.org/2021/06/07/private-benefit-versus-public-good/↩
  15. [15]David Benfell, “A dark cloud: Bleaker times to come,” Not Housebroken, May 8, 2015, https://disunitedstates.org/2015/05/08/a-dark-cloud-bleaker-times-to-come/; David Benfell, “Walking off a cliff,” Not Housebroken, November 27, 2015, https://disunitedstates.org/2015/11/27/walking-off-a-cliff/↩
  16. [16]Ellen Schrecker, “The 50-Year War on Higher Education,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 14, 2022, https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-50-year-war-on-higher-education↩

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