October 30, 2023

Earlier this week, I attended the theatrical debut of Dinesh D’Souza’s compelling new documentary Police State.  As much as I liked the movie, there was one subject left unexplored: the ironic fact that, today, among those most vulnerable to the “police state” are local police.

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Searching for a more inclusive metaphor than “police state” to describe our current state of peril, I reached into the past and came up with “Jacobin Justice.”  In the way of background, the left-wing Jacobins were the most powerful political faction to emerge during the French Revolution.

The power of this bourgeois elite derived from their ability to manage the Parisian mobs.  To satisfy the mob’s bloodlust, the Jacobins imposed a state of revolutionary justice untethered to any traditional sense of Judeo-Christian morality.  The result was a reign of terror that saw more than 10,000 people tried and executed. 

There have been outbreaks of mob justice throughout American history, but it is only really in the last ten years or so that America’s Jacobins, our “best people,” gave mob justice their blessing.  To be sure, Jacobins have been using mobs since the emergence of the Soviet Union a century ago, but largely for propaganda purposes.

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In cases from Sacco and Vanzetti to the Central Park Five, the Jacobins in the media would muster the evidence that seemed to exonerate the accused and suppress the evidence that convicted them.  The mobs would rally and nurse their grievances until the next election.  Win-win.

Hollywood, meanwhile, created characters that embodied a romantic notion of Jacobin justice.  In the way of example, screenwriter Reginald Rose describes Juror #8, the hero of the 1957 movie Twelve Angry Men, as “a man who sees all sides of every question and constantly seeks the truth.  A man of strength tempered with compassion.  Above all, he is a man who wants justice to be done and will fight to see that it is.”  Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird reflects the same virtues, as do a thousand lawyers in a thousand preachy TV shows.  The Jacobin, citizen or attorney, resists public pressures and demands justice for the marginalized.

By the year 2012, however, the Jacobins were finding common ground not with Atticus Finch, but with Robespierre.  Instead of resisting the mob as Atticus did, they sided with the mob, managed it, encouraged it.  Instead of defending the transparently guilty, they felt free to condemn the transparently innocent.  Oddly, almost no one noticed what may have been the darkest turn in judicial history.

In February 2012, in Florida, a battleground state, the Jacobins put their revised strategy to the test, transforming a Hispanic, Obama-supporting civil rights activist into a murderous white supremacist.  A neighborhood watch captain, George Zimmerman shot and killed the deeply troubled young Trayvon Martin in self-defense.  Zimmerman aspired to be a police officer.  He never got the chance.

With a president to re-elect, the media flaunted their growing indifference to the truth.  In the seventeen months between Martin’s death and Zimmerman’s acquittal, they would violate all accepted journalistic standards in their effort to help Jacobin handyman Al Sharpton and his cronies convict a transparently innocent man.  This was a milestone, the first time in anyone’s memory that the national media writ large conspired to enable so conspicuous an injustice.

With the help of social media, mobs, both real and virtual, descended on Florida to demand justice for Martin.  As Los Angeles filmmaker Joel Gilbert proved beyond doubt in The Trayvon Hoax, prosecutors used as their star witness a woman who was not a witness at all.  The media pretended not to notice the most flagrant corruption of the judicial process in their careers.