VDH: Living Out Critical Legal Theory (Ferguson, the border and beyond)

The National Review's The Corner ^ | August 19, 2014 | Victor Davis Hanson

[2ndDivisionVet]

It may not have been the aim of Missouri Highway Patrol captain Ron Johnson to outsource security responsibilities to someone affiliated with the New Black Panthers and a legal activist group, but that is the impression that one receives from listening to his exchange with and praise of Malik Shabazz. If this is the same Malik Shabazz who has a long history of virulent racist and inflammatory anti-Semitic statements, then there has been at least a partial erosion of legal authority in Ferguson.

[2ndDivisionVet]

Wow!

[Dan(9698)]

trying to encapsulate to a receptive but somewhat Mr. Johnson at the recent press conference

What can this possibly mean?

[2ndDivisionVet]

I think it means a word or words were somehow deleted from the column. Let me search for the same subject in a different venue.

[2ndDivisionVet]

Can’t find this particular column posted anywhere else yet.

[nathanbedford]

Dr. Hansen makes explicit the point of a reply,

Where is Wyatt Earp when you need him?

filed by a FReeper who does not know the difference between Fullerton and Ferguson, Missouri.

[2001convSVT]

"the sanctity of established law exists only to the degree that it is considered useful"

Money Line! This is becoming all to often the view by those in search of power and accepted by the ignorant (shame on the schools for not teaching the founding principles of our Republic).

[Mouton]

Good point.

We no longer have a system of law set by legislation and precedent. Today we have those who have gone beyond the “living constitution” theory of law and evolved into the area of social justice which is the equal of doing plastic surgery without sterilized tools upon the legal system.

[unsycophant]

I hope VDH got a load of rapper Nelly, running around Ferguson with tshirts saying “ #weneedaverdictnow “ yesterday.

[Servant of the Cross]

Legal statutes are seen as constructs that legitimize the prejudices of the wealthy and the privileged of society. Our so-called legislatures and judiciaries use the law as means of coercion to ensure their own position in a most unfair hierarchy. In response, the proverbial people, whether in Ferguson or at the border certainly, or, yes, at the Obama Department of Justice, have the moral right to ignore these constructs and instead to fashion their own sort of higher justice, which deserves to be canonized as legal and binding.

In all these cases, any particular law at any particular moment can be judged obsolete and an impediment to social justice — and so it can be replaced immediately by a sort of revolutionary justice with the full backing of the administrative state.

And 0bama/Holder (with useful idiot help from Officer Johnson) just 'deputized' Malik Shabazz as 'Wyatt Earp'.

[drpix]

A pioneer of "Critical Legal Theory" is Obama's long time mentor and buddy, law school professor Derrick Bell. Here they are together:

In Ferguson, its is not only "Critical Legal Theory" that is in play but another black radical innovation for which Derrick Bell was a pioneer - "Narrative Scholarship." This is a "scholarship" that uses storytelling/fiction, rather than legal or historical arguments to support and advance radical black racist theories.

And accordingly Obama and his crowd's story of Ferguson is advanced and supported.

[Servant of the Cross]

VDH ping ...

[wastoute]

The real question is, “When will Americans finally say,’Enough!’?”

[bert]

If there is no law, then there is no law

[nathanbedford]

Your post, as usual, is spot on.

I think we should make it clear for the record that which is going on in Ferguson. The inversion of reason leads to the inversion of the rule law. It has long been the goal of utopian leftists like disciples of Saul Alinsky such as Barack Obama to invert reason in order to destroy the rule of law thus paving the way for their top down utopia.

That is why we see the Black Panthers intervening, including those who are not from the White House but from California. That is why we see leftist MSNBC duplicating its scurrilous reporting of the George Zimmerman persecution in Ferguson, Missouri. That is why we see the forum shopping, the prosecutor shopping, the police chief shopping, the witness shopping which no doubt is going on even as we read this.

The inversion of reason is a fruit, the poisonous fruit, of the Frankfurt School which consciously set out to destroy not only our institutions but our culture and not only our culture but the reasoning process which sustains our civil society. We see the absence of reason on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri just as we see its absence in so many places we call "the Arab Street."

We witness the astonishing specter of police standing aside condoning looting because the eco system which sustains the rule of law has disintegrated. When the rule of law goes, the center cannot hold.

Clearly, the rule of law cannot long endure against a cultural inversion of the kind we see nightly in Ferguson, Missouri.

[Servant of the Cross]

The inversion of reason leads to the inversion of the rule law. It has long been the goal of utopian leftists like disciples of Saul Alinsky such as Barack Obama to invert reason in order to destroy the rule of law thus paving the way for their top down utopia.

That is why we see leftist MSNBC duplicating its scurrilous reporting of the George Zimmerman persecution in Ferguson, Missouri. That is why we see the forum shopping, the prosecutor shopping, the police chief shopping, the witness shopping which no doubt is going on even as we read this.

It's so blatantly awful, even former CNN anchor Howie Kurtz is calling out these liberal 'news' outlets for their collaboration ....

“Some liberal outlets [are] creating almost a lynch mob mentality around this, the Huffington Post today, screaming banner headline ‘Arrest Him.’ Now, the Huffington Post, nor you or I, knows exactly what happened” he said. And “when you cross that line into becoming an advocate and to demanding that somebody be prosecuted before the facts are in, while the investigation is going on, you’re grandstanding, you’re trying to keep the story alive and I really think it’s troubling.”

Kurtz also criticized CNN for showing the house of accused officer Darren Wilson, stating, “It defies my understanding how you could put his life or the life of his family in danger by even briefly showing the house or naming the street.”

[time4good]

I’ve just been spectating ‘til now - but - Kurtz doesn’t realize how explosive that is.

It just hit me. If Darren Wilson, a policeman by all truthful accounts doing what he thought right at the moment, dies at the hand of rioters or angry mobs - it will touch off civil unrest that the coward Holder and agitator Zero did not anticipate. And not the kind they welcome.

[Osage Orange]

Ha!!

[Osage Orange]

Excellent post!!