Vigilante Injustice
Today, the problem is that vigilantes have become folk heroes.
During the 1930s, Hollywood essentially made two kinds of movies. The first were the escapist fare that was intended to take people’s minds off the Great Depression, consisting of musicals, romances involving shopgirls and wealthy playboys who just needed the love of a good woman in order to shape up and take over the family business, and, of course, madcap screwball comedies.
Then there were those other movies, usually churned out by Warner Brothers that were gritty and usually starred Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart or Eddie G. Robinson. They usually involved gangsters and tommy guns, but sometimes dealt with “serious social issues.” One of the most serious being a perversion of the justice system. If innocent men weren’t being sent off to Alcatraz or Sing-Sing, they were being set upon by vigilante mobs.
Paul Muni had to escape from a southern chain gang, Spencer Tracy was nearly roasted alive in a small town jail, Dana Andrews was hanged as a cattle rustler. Anyone who knew Dana Andrews knew he’d never stoop to rustling.
Generally if you were the star of the movie and you looked around the set and saw Bruce Cabot anywhere in the vicinity, you knew without having to read the script that at some point he was going to show up with a rope leading a mob and telling the sheriff to get out of the way if he didn’t want to get his neck stretched.
The whole point of these movies, aside from selling tickets, was to let people know that Americans aren’t supposed to take justice into their own hands.
Today, the problem is that vigilantes have become folk heroes. The creeps in BLM and Antifa set themselves up as judge, jury and executioner, and they’re cheered on by left-wing politicians and the media.
In recent months when Mark and Patricia McCloskey, in St. Louis, Missouri; Kyle Rittenhouse, in Kenosha, Wisconsin; and Jake Gardner, in Omaha, Nebraska; defended themselves or their homes against the marauders, they were the ones who found themselves being arrested.
You might expect that sort of thing happening on one of the coasts, but you don’t expect mayors, district attorneys and police chiefs, to be that perverted in the middle of the country.
In the case of Mr. Gardner, he shot a protester who was a career criminal with a violent record who happened to be choking him at the time.
Initially, the county prosecutor, Don Kleine, ruled that Gardner had acted lawfully. But once the mob pushed back and demanded blood, Kleine decided that Gardner was a white supremacist who had to pay for his crime.
The attacks on social media drove Gardner, an ex-Marine, to seek refuge at his father’s home in Oregon. But the attacks didn’t stop. His mother and other relatives were receiving death threats. Finally, knowing that returning to Nebraska to face a trial meant a certain conviction, Gardner took his own life. If justice actually existed outside of TV courtroom dramas, everyone who helped hound this innocent man to death would be breaking rocks with a sledgehammer on a chain gang.
After I shared Matthew McConaughey’s address in Austin, Texas, I was scolded by a subscriber named Joe. He said I was guilty of targeting the Oscar-winning actor for a crazy stalker. I disagreed. For one thing, I only suggested (sort of) that people egg his house because he snubbed me. For another, I don’t have any crazy subscribers. If I did, I wouldn’t let everyone know my own address, for God’s sake.
For a third thing, all of my subscribers are old. They’d be lucky to be able to throw an egg over the schmuck’s wall, let along reach his house. Tom Brady probably couldn’t reach his house.
For a fourth thing, the people who got me his address aren’t his close personal friends. They found out his address by looking it up on the internet, which I could have done if I knew how to do it. People even know how to find pictures of people’s houses on the internet. Three people sent me photos of McConaughey’s mansion.
One of his fellow Texans alerted me that McConaughey is a far-left dingbat whose best bud is dumb Woody Harrelson, the world’s major one advocate for marijuana. So if someone wants to go ahead and try to hurl an egg 100 yards at the guy’s mansion and at least maybe hit the Lincoln parked in the driveway, I’m sorry to disappoint you, Joe, but I’m going to give him the green light.
I’m certainly not surprised that the Democrats did everything they could to steal the election for Biden. I’m not even disappointed. It’s what I have come to expect of the party that’s spent the past 40 years giving us Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and now the oldest president in our history.
What I do resent is that there are so many millions of Americans who don’t object to the elective process being corrupted so long as their guy won. Why would they even want to live in a country where cheaters prosper? Why not move to Cuba or Venezuela where at least nobody has to pretend the elections are honest?
The most cynical thing I’ve heard in a long time has been left-wing pundits acknowledging that monkey business took place in states like Michigan, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, but not enough to make a difference in the final result. My own guess is that they’re probably right. But guessing isn’t the same as knowing.
I expect to hate everything President Biden does over the next four years, but it would be a lot easier to stomach if I knew that he actually received 6,139,480 more votes than Donald Trump.
Somebody pointed out the foolishness of people blithely accepting a certain amount of fraud in our elections by asking if they’d object to their employer including a certain number of counterfeit bills in their pay envelope.
Maybe after years of accepting FDA guidelines when it comes to our food and drink, we have simply become inured to the imperfections of life here on earth. After all, if we can accept a certain number of rodent hairs in our hot dogs, what’s a stolen election now and then?
Stephen Hanover sent along the following: “Burt, you recently wrote about the value of gratitude. With that in mind, I recently came across the following: ‘Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity, a meal into a feast, a house into a home and a stranger into a friend.’”
A few jokes have come in over the transom in recent weeks and it’s time to use them or lose them.
From Joseph Neuner: An old man calls his son and says, “Listen, your mother and I are getting a divorce. Forty-five years of misery is enough. We’re calling it a day.”
“Dad,” his son screams, “what are you talking about?”
“It was inevitable. We can’t stand the sight of each other. I don’t even want to talk about it. Do me a favor and call your sister. Let her know the good news.”
The son calls his sister, who hollers: “Like hell they’re getting divorced!”
As soon as she hangs up, she calls her old man and announces: “Don’t do a thing until we get there. And absolutely don’t dare contact a lawyer until we’ve talked! We’re flying down in the morning.”
The old man hangs up the phone, turns to his wife and says: “Didn’t I tell you not to worry? They’re both coming home for Christmas.”
According to Howard Last, Jesus challenged Moses to a game of golf. Moses accepted and hit his first drive 200 yards down the center of the freeway. Jesus then teed off and hooked his drive into the rough. But a squirrel picked up his ball and dropped it on the fairway.
Moses then hits his approach shot and sees it land just 20 feet from the cup. Jesus hits his second shot over the green and winds up in the rough again. This time a field mouse runs over and picks up his ball. Just then, a hawk swoops down and grabs the mouse. As he flies over the green, the mouse drops the ball, which rolls into the cup.
At which point, Moses turns to Jesus and says: “So are we going to play golf or just screw around?”
Vickie Neill let me know that while listening to Andrew Klavan’s show, she heard something that made her laugh. It made me laugh, too.
German Chancellor Angela Merkle comes to America. After the customs officer asks her name, he then says, “Occupation?”
“No,” replies Merkle, “just visiting.”
