The Necropolitan Sentinel

When Eric Holder decided to dismiss the conviction against the New Black Panthers who stood outside a Philly polling place on Election Day 2008 with billy clubs, making threatening comments, he set the standard that his DoJ has upheld ever since. We know that among his directives was an expressed disinterest in prosecuting minorities for infractions that would get white or Asian folks thrown in jail. Breitbart has continued to cover the manifest fraud of Pigford II, in which plaintiffs who argued that they had an interest in farming could sue the Department of Agriculture for big cash settlements, enriching a handful of Democrat-connected trial lawyers in the process. Pat Dollard and others continue to point out the insanity of Dearborn Muslims pelting Christians at their festival with rocks and water bottles, among other projectiles, while police stand by and accuse the protesters of fomenting the violence against them, even though they are clearly within their constitutional rights to demonstrate, a matter that is finally going to trial, without the help of the DoJ. More recently, the administration was quick to blame the murders of Chris Stevens and other Americans at the Benghazi embassy on a bad movie made by a shadowy figure and seen by practically nobody, and NYC's transit authority caved to an act of vandalism by an Egyptian-American activist against Pam Geller's subway posters, stating that the US should stand with those who behave civilly and against those who behave savagely, which seems like a reasonable foreign relations proposition.

In all these cases, and many more, the feds have essentially said to us that those with legitimate grievances, as determined by the knee-jerk PC sympathies of progressive authorities, must be treated as though they suffered from diminished capacity to distinguish right from wrong according both to the law and longstanding occidental values, and at the same time that their views should be accorded the full intellectual respect that one typically bestows on those who behave according to those values—assuming that their arguments are cogent and proceed from reasonable premises. 

People who have brain damage or who suffer from psychiatric illnesses elicit our sympathy, to be sure, if we are fully human, but we can hardly be blamed if we don’t, for example, choose to place our financial stakes in the hands of someone who is bi-polar. We may listen with interest to a paranoid schizophrenic’s rantings, but if we choose not to derive our epistemology from that individual, it is perhaps more a matter of discretion than of prejudice. Likewise, we may listen to the special pleadings of the academicians on behalf of the differently culturally enabled, but that doesn’t mean that we throw our values out the window in order to make way for theirs. Yet that is what we are told again and again by progressives to do, and that is the policy of the DoJ and the administration.

It is, quite frankly, crazy.

It is certainly possible to debate whether these values have evolved or whether they've been handed down by God, inscribed in tablets or the written-down words of one of His supposed messengers, or both, if you are a kind of evolutionary meliorist. The larger question is whether they have served us well or ill. Until recently, most Americans would have agreed that they have served us rather well, despite the manifest ingratitude of the proggies. Included in that calculation would be the whole matter of free speech, now under attack by the administration, and which served the neo-fascist liberals well during their long march through the institutions that they now control. Having arrived in the ascendancy with the election of Barack Obama and control of Congress, they suddenly have discovered that freedom of speech is problematic, particularly in view of their losses in 2010. Not to worry, though: the MSM are so deep in the tank that they need heliox to keep from getting the bends.

Having sold their credibilty for a utopia that will never transpire, they now wish to protect themselves by becoming an informal adjunct to the progressive agenda. Morning Joe's admission that they based their reporting of the Romney-Ryan kerfuffle on a piece of Politico agitprop, and that they are therefore exempt from any blame for having gotten the story wrong, and they've been mistreated by those who think perhaps they heard what was convenient to a prescribed political point of view, is a not unusual case in point. Some polling operations, many of them affilitated with the MSM, are admitting that they are using 2008 turnout models as the basis for their weighting, without making any adjustments for what happened in 2010, as if that is a reasonable mirror of the electorate after four years of Obama failures. Univision is doing the reporting on Fast and Furious that the US legacy media will not. In some quarters, there's even a little skepticism about the administration's much-revised account of what happened in Benghazi—though Jay Carney insists that it would now be imprudent to comment on behalf of the White House about what actually did happen, as the State Department, which failed repeatedly to deal with a clearly dicey situation there despite the embassy's requests, and the FBI, members of whom are presently in Tripoli waiting for Benghazi to get safe enough for them, are supposed to be investigating in the timely fashion that always distinguishes this administration's efforts at investigating itself. 

In short, we now get to witness the MSM advancing a claim of diminished capacity on its own behalf, while insisting that we must respect their authority. Good luck with that, boys and girls.

In 1979, Steve Martin could play for laughs the story of an adopted white guy who grows up believing he's black. It's not a joke, anymore, because epistemology!

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