Did you catch Trump’s pro-criminal justice reform super bowl ad, an ad he’s said is needed because of the “very disproportionate and very unfair” treatment of black and brown people? Here’s it is in case you missed it:
Glenn Beck expressed his love for the ad on his February 3 show, calling it “one of most effective ads [he’s] ever seen [for] reaching out” to black voters. Fellow Blazer Steve Deace not only agreed with this sentiment, he openly encouraged Republicans to keep going down the criminal justice reform road.
The ad hails Trump for not just talking about effecting change concerning criminal justice reform but doing something to actually get it done, and it features Alice Johnson, a woman given clemency by Trump at the urging of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.
Johnson had received a life without parole sentence after being convicted of “leading a multi-million-dollar drug ring that dealt in tons of cocaine from 1991-94,” a crime Beck and Co. are apparently OK with after brushing it off as just another unfair sentence issued by an unfair system to another first time “non-violent” offender of color guilty of a little marijuana crime.
Nor does it matter to the pro-Trump echo chamber that they had to steal a little of the revolutionary left’s “abolish all prisons” thunder in order to do it. Anything goes so long as it gets Trump some votes, and that’s only the beginning of the problem.
In order to accept the charge that an inherent, systemic, and structural racism is responsible for creating a disparate impact and implicit bias in our laws, law enforcement, criminal justice system, and society at large against black, brown, and all marginalized/oppressed peoples, you have accept the Marxist and/or revolutionary anarchist premise that the whole of our society, from the Constitution on down, is derived from America’s founding by capitalists motivated by white supremacy.
Unfortunately, without so much as a word in defense of our founding framework, the political-right has accepted this charge by the political-left as its own, choosing to throw liberty under the bus for an outside chance that Trump might gain a slice of the pro-criminal justice reform black vote.
Where this goes from here we can only imagine, but with calls for reparations coming from voters who hold to the belief of inherent white supremacy, how long will it be before Trump and the new “conservative” right steal that revolutionary cause from the left and adopt it as their own as well?
Given the interchangeability of revolutionary collectivist causes between the left and right these days, it’s no wonder the new “conservative” right is so torn between bullying the masses into voting for Trump or voting for “any Democrat” in order to defeat him; with no love lost for liberty on their part either way.
By going down the reform path, Trump and the GOP aren’t just playing to the margins of the right, they’re playing to the heart of left as well. And why not? Trump’s base has already been trained to believe they have no other choice but to vote for him. Those votes are already in the bag.
Criminal justice reform isn’t the only area in which the Trump train has opted to jump its alleged conservative rails in the pursuit of leftist votes. For example, the Trump Administration recently hosted the pro-gun control organization Stand with Parkland for a meeting on “school safety.”
Trump didn’t invite Fred Guttenberg, the Parkland parent invited by Pelosi to be at the State of the Union who was ejected from it after yelling at Trump when he mentioned the Second Amendment, so Trump’s pro-gun base still has a little something they can point to as justification for their unwavering support of him as a staunchly pro-Second Amendment/pro-gun President.
Where Trump and the new “conservative” right — including the NRA — ultimately land on criminal justice, guns, and the Constitution at large in the end depends entirely what’s going to land them the most votes.
Sadly, the more “trained” Trump’s so-called conservative base continues to be, the more our rights and liberty remain up in the air; for sale to the highest progressive bidder. Meanwhile, we’re losing any chance we have of preserving them.
Joe Marshall was born and raised in the Finger Lakes Region of Upstate NY. He is a married father of two grown sons, an outdoorsman, a landscape contractor, a former stock car owner and driver, a certified 4H firearms instructor, and a retired New York State corrections officer.
Joe is the author of the book, Last Call for Liberty
