09/20/2023
The redoubtable Diana West has posted an important essay at Conservative HQ: The Red Pedigree of Judge Tanya Chutkan, September 7, 2023.
Actually it is two essays fused into one. I discuss the second part in Diana West: Commissar Chutkan Channeling Her (Never Disavowed) Communist Family Tradition.
The first part of West’s essay is highly original and very valuable.
In 1968 the Democratic Convention in Chicago was disrupted by several days of violent riots. There followed a trial of the Chicago Seven for various types of conspiracy to riot charges.
The trial itself was a riot with the accused particularly focused on insulting Judge Julius Hoffman. This resulted in Hoffman sentencing all eight defendants and both of their attorneys to lengthy jail terms for contempt of court.
West points out:
The five anti-war activists who were convicted … were sentenced to five years in prison and fined $5,000 each [in addition to the contempt penalties — VDARE].
Five years? Let that sink in. Five years was the maximum sentence for inciting the DNC street rioting. January 6, dude? No, Chicago '68, man.
Back then … the U.S. government hadn’t yet tyrannized itself with that cruel and unusual legal perversion on steroids known a “terrorism enhancement” to “escalate” minor charges into 10-, 15-, 17-year stretches.
further noting
…those five convicted Chicago rioters fifty years ago were not, as J6ers are now, subjected to years of pretrial detention in inhumane conditions, including physical abuse and torture; they were free on bail for the three years their case took to wend its way from indictment to conviction to appeal. It was a vacation next to the cruelty and force inflicted on Trump supporters (not BLM or Antifa, of course) by today’s “justice” system.
Yesterday’s “justice” system, however, was not lacking in liberal partisans. (This was the era of the Left Legislature otherwise known as The Warren Court.) It sprang into action and rescued the rioters, on grounds which, as West points out, are directly applicable to Commissar Chutkan’s behavior.
Here’s how the Associated Press reported the 1972 decision.
CHICAGO — Declaring that the trial judge took an “often antagonistic view of the defense,” a federal appeals court has overturned the conviction of five antiwar activists in the case of the Chicago 7.
…the appeals court ruled that their constitutional rights may have been violated in the bitter four-month trial before U.S. District Court Judge Julius J. Hoffman. …
Amazing. They had constitutional rights.
What a difference a half century makes. Today, not only does a “deprecatory and antagonistic attitude toward the defense” not trigger appellate reversal, darned if such “attitude” isn’t the new judicial temperament — the baseline requirement for a federal judgeship. Indeed, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan goes farther than expressing animus against Trump and his supporters. Chutkan has even exulted from the bench on the righteousness of the violent and destructive Marxist-BLM protests of 2020. Reaction? Institutional ho-hum
West backs this up by quoting in full Representative Matt Gaetz’ House resolution censuring and condemning Judge Chutkan for her “open bias and partisanship in the conduct of her duties as a judge.” She says
It is urgently important reading because undoubtedly Chutkan’s outbursts will be news to many readers.
West summarizes
…the regime has instituted its permanent reign of judicial terror: ever-expanding dragnets, continuing arrests, destroying families, businesses, and communities, plus show trials and prison sentences that are shocking and even paralyzing in their draconian force. Throwing American citizens into a gulag for misdemeanors by fiat transformed into acts of “terrorism” becomes so much pseudo-legal camouflage for what is in reality the fiery flame-out, the crash-and-burn of the United States of America into one-party tyranny.
Peter Brimelow was right: Trump’s Indictment — Like I Said, This Is A Communist Coup.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.