Equal Justice as Another Casualty of War

By: James Trusty

While many Americans properly focus on the carnage and chaos of two wars, there is also a more subtle war being waged by progressive mayors—and others in high positions—on fundamentally important notions like Rule of Law and Equal Justice. Last weekend over 100,000 protesters descended upon Washington, D.C. to chant and vandalize as a bewildering show of support for Hamas, an entity that demonstrates its stated intention to kill all Jews by raping, torturing, and killing everyone from Holocaust survivors to infants. It would take a book, not a blog, to fairly document the horrific antisemitism (and profound ignorance) that is on display across the U.S. and Europe, but for brevity’s sake let’s focus on selective prosecution and the law enforcement “response” to events like the D.C. one.

The temptation in assessing blame here, of course, tends to start with the mixed messaging of a White House that “stands with Israel” while throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at the corrupt Palestinian Authority, openly supporting a “pause” because that word seemed a tricky camouflage for an appeasing cease fire, and refusing to acknowledge obvious Iran’s complicity in the October 7 massacre. But even with the White House’s complete lack of moral clarity, it is clear that no matter who occupies that structure, city mayors have shown themselves capable of institutionally-damaging behavior when political protests hit their city.

Which brings us to Washington, D.C.’s Mayor Bowser and the criminal justice system in the District. This weekend, protestors marched to the White House, leaving a trail of antisemitic graffiti (“Death to Israel” and “Kill the Jews,” to highlight a couple), splashing red paint handprints on a White House stone gate, and climbing the security fence that protects the White House. With thousands of protesters spouting genocidal slogans and ascending the single fence that separates their hateful bigotry from the current White House occupants, surely the Secret Service and Metropolitan Police Department (“MPD”) would spring into action, aggressively deterring and arresting a mob hell-bent on celebrating the cowardly and evil slaughter of innocents just three weeks earlier.

Instead, by Sunday morning the MPD was regurgitating free speech platitudes while announcing a single vandalism arrest, and the U.S. Secret Service proudly announced that the “attempted gate trespass” was handled without incident. Statutes were apparently defaced again, but the D.C. criminal justice system long-ago made it clear that vandalizing the right statues was okay by it.

Surely, our intrepid Attorney General will enlist volunteer prosecutors from around the country, restructure the D.C. United States Attorney’s Office to include a “Hamas Insurrection Unit” (akin to its restructuring for the “Capitol Siege Investigations” unit) and subpoena cell towers, hotel records, and bank records to identify and investigate every person who participated in the weekend’s madness. At the least, Mr. Garland will take to the airwaves to insist that his loyalty to the Rule of Law compels him to charge those who attempt to trespass (a euphemistic approach that wrongly suggests it would only be a crime if the climbers got inside the White House itself), who vandalize both White House property and nearby storefronts, and anyone who hoped to disrupt the “official proceedings” presumably taking place inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Maybe if they had just borrowed some tiki torches from those Charlottesville idiots, the Hamas nazis could have found themselves in legal jeopardy.

Is there any real question that D.C. law enforcement would have considerably less tolerance of law breaking if the protesters happened to wear telltale red caps? Recent history shows that Mayor Bowser literally rewarded BLM’s street vandalism by renaming a Plaza for them. If there is some polar opposite to the Broken Windows approach to law enforcement, this must be it. But the bottom-line explanation comes down to one of two things, either a conscious decision to avoid any police/protester conflicts because the imagery of those encounters can politically harm the incumbent mayor, or a growing comfort for politicians from mayor through Attorney General and President with using law enforcement as an extension of partisan politics.

Federal and D.C. statutes do not have disclaimers that “this law shall only be enforced against” the Right or the Left. Our laws have always been crafted to support free speech and assembly, but under First Amendment jurisprudence, criminal trespass and vandalism are not protected by the Constitution any more than obstruction or assault. Sadly, it appears that the decisionmakers in Washington, D.C. have injected their own unequal philosophy into law enforcement, with the chief beneficiaries this past weekend being those whose who would celebrate Hitler’s Final Solution and the already demonic violence visited upon 1400 victims in Israel. It is hard to grasp the fact that ignorant students and unassimilated nihilists are proudly supporting a Jewish genocide in cities across the U.S. It is harder still to watch a criminal justice system converted into a Pretorian Guard, only activated to do its job after the politicians dole out immunity for some and targeting instructions for others.