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I saw the following exchange between Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson, and it made me angry. So instead of getting over it and going and doing normal things like a well adjusted adult, I decided to complain about it on the internet.
First of all, I'm at least glad to see that reality is starting to set in. Trump is going to get his nonsense "absolute immunity" claim promptly rejected 9-0 by the Supreme Court. He's going to go on trial on March 4, he's going to get convicted, and he's going to go to prison. This has all been obvious for some time, and people do need to come to grips with it instead of telling themselves "it can't happen, so it won't".
But there is a stark mismatch here between the acceptance on one hand that the jury will convict Trump but the insistence on the other hand that "the charges aren't real". DC is an overwhelmingly democratic voting jurisdiction, but you would need to be cynical indeed to think there is no chance that even one Democrat juror would refuse to imprison a political opponent on obviously baseless charges. But of course, the charges are not nearly so baseless as Carlson suggests.
No, the reason that Kelly and Carlson know that Trump is going down is not because they think there is not one honest soul to be found in DC. They can have confidence Trump will lose this case because both his conduct and the law have little mystery about them. On the facts, there's little if any dispute about the actions that Trump took. On the law we have seen similar charges applied to many January 6 defendants, and it has not gone well for them. If Trump is to get similar treatment for similar conduct, he must be convicted.
Carlson and Kelly know that he's guilty and yet they pretend otherwise. Carlson rants about how outrageous it is to render people's votes meaningless, and yet when Trump is charged for conspiring to do exactly that he flatly states it's "not even a real crime". I emphasize that his contention here isn't even that Trump didn't do the awful thing he's accused of - he's saying that the things he's accused of aren't awful. This lays bare how empty and fake Carlson's feigned defence of democracy is. You can believe that it's outrageous to deprive people of their democratic rights or you can believe that conspiring to deprive people of their democratic rights isn't a "real crime", but it's incoherent to claim both.
But worst of all is the "warning" of violence. Carlson tells us that the man who incited a riot must not be punished or else we'll get more riots. This is the logic of terrorism. Give us what we want or there will be blood. Sure, he phrases it as a prediction rather than a threat and says he detests violence... but he knows full well that many of the people who might actually commit it could well be listening to him, and he knows he is fanning the flames of their resentment and putting the thought of violence in their heads. This would be irresponsible even if Carlson were sincere, but the fact that he's obviously being cynical makes it worse. This is a man who passionately hates Trump and couldn't wait for him to get kicked out of the White House - and yet here he is inventing excuses for him, pre-emptively trying to discredit the verdict he knows is coming, sanewashing Trump's "rigged election" claims, stoking anger, and telling people that violence is the inevitable response if Trump gets locked up. All, one presumes, so he can maintain his position in the GOP media ecosystem. What a worm.
Smith and Chuktan will obviously not allow themselves to be swayed by threats of violence, so we will unfortunately get to see if the dark talk turns into action. I for one hope Trump's most volatile supporters will at least recognize the truth that Carlson acknowledges - it will go extremely badly for anyone who takes it upon themselves to shed blood.
I've been thinking a lot on the application of the laws. A couple stories come to mind.
First, a literal friend of a friend. We were both at a mutual friend's house for dinner one night. I didn't know him before this evening, and I never saw him again afterward. It was a while ago; I can't precisely age him; I would guess 30s. He was a black man. All I really remember is that nearly the entire evening, he was talking about how unjust he thought marijuana laws were. He expressed that, because of this belief, he thought that it was his duty to continue selling marijuana in violation of the law that he thought unjust. To the point of saying something along the lines of, "I have a child now that I want to take care of, but I will absolutely go back to jail, because I have a duty to keep selling marijuana."
I remember thinking at the time that it was just a terrible pragmatic decision, because regardless of his belief on the justness of the law, it seemed implausible that his persistent violation of it would have any remotely meaningful effect. It's still above my pay grade to have any sort of judgment on the perspective where you're convinced that a law and the means by which it is being prosecuted is unjust at its core, unfairly and unjustly applied, perhaps in a discriminatory way toward unfavorables, and then having to decide what to do about it. But it helped me understand just how much opprobrium many people can have when they see such things that they consider to be abuses of what may be otherwise legitimate political power, especially when they think that a part of the abuse is, "They wouldn't put me in jail for it if I were white."
The second example is Doug Hughes, the mailman who landed his ultralight gyrocopter on Capitol Hill. His political shtick was that he was "delivering letters" to politicians to protest campaign finance laws. But it was all over the news, a major embarrassment to the Obama administration. How could this guy just fly in to DC airspace?! It's one of the most protected airspaces in the world and there are special flight rules that must be observed in order to enter it. (He likely would not have received authorization to enter if he had asked according to procedure.)
However, those rules are just little bitty administrative rules, basically. You talk to pilots who are in the 'pilot community', and they know that you definitely take those rules seriously, because if you even accidentally break them, the minute you land, you're going to be interrogated by someone from the FAA (and possibly law enforcement) to figure out what you were up to, and the likely outcome in any event is that they're going to revoke your pilot's license.
But, uh, Doug Hughes didn't have a pilot's license for them to revoke! You don't need to have a pilot's license to fly an ultralight gyrocopter! The Powers That Be were in a bit of a pickle. They had to make an example of this guy, somehow. Their only normal recourse was to take the license that he didn't even have. Soooo, they scoured the law books, grasping for anything they could come up with. What they found was that, with the added weight of the letters, the total weight of his gyrocopter was just barely above the weight limit for ultralight aircraft, and there's a real big boy statute with real criminal felony penalties requiring a pilot's license to fly heavier aircraft. That's how they got him.
I can't help but think that if Mr. Hughes flew his slightly-overweight gyrocopter literally anywhere else, in a way that didn't bring national embarrassment to The Powers That Be, his criminal conviction would have evaporated at twenty different levels of discretion. First off, probably no one would have even known. Who the hell monitors the weight of these little guys on a regular basis? Nobody. And even if someone did notice, they might have just chuckled. "Can't believe you managed to get that beefy boi up!" Mayyyyyyyybe someone miiiiight have quietly noticed and whispered, "Hey Doug, don't do it again, or at least, don't let other people know, because I just came to the brilliant realization that it's technically illegal, that pretty cool thing I just saw you do and am otherwise giving you social props for." (It is left as an exercise for the reader to estimate the likelihood of criminal sanctions if the flight had gathered attention, but was widely viewed as being politically favorable to The Powers That Be.)
Spoilers: The jurisdiction we were in at the time of the marijuana conversation has now legalized marijuana. Recently, the FAA has basically acknowledged that weight limits have very little to do with safety and may, in fact, be detrimental to safety when it comes to regulation of small aircraft.
I recently read a couple books by William Riker, who to my knowledge, has never stepped foot on any model of the starship Enterprise. Particularly of note here is his Liberalism Against Populism, written in '87. Much of it is mathematical minutia of the the pros/cons of different voting systems and the pathologies which may follow, but in his concluding chapters, he presents a fascinating interpretation of political science/philosophy, public/social choice theory as sort of a general domain that seems to have some sense grown out of economics departments in the late 20th century.
Riker acknowledges the common refrain that economics is 'the dismal science', since it deals with allocation of scarce resources, and sort of no matter what choices you make, someone is not going to have everything they want (especially if what they want is basically everything). Of course, some people lose economically, due to a variety of factors which may or may not be under their control, but he says that social choice is the real dismal science, for at least in economics you can very often find positive sum trades sort of just sitting around all over the place. They can make things genuinely better for pretty much everyone!
In a sort of analogy, in his mind, social choice is also a study of the allocation of a scarce resource, but that scare resource is political and moral values. These are often distributed in a zero-sum fashion (think two-candidate elections). Or, as he flatly says, "Suppose that, ..., it is still the intent of each possible winner to impose some kind of external cost on the losers. Then, no matter who wins, there exists a loser who is the worse off for having participated in the political system." He contrasts economic scarcity, which means that those who cannot pay or convince a Soviet-style planning commission to allocate to them must go without, to political/moral scarcity, which "requires that the nonpossessor suffer additional punishment for nonpossession". He then leverages his long work on voting systems and 'heresthetics' to argue that it will, in fact, often lead to dissatisfaction by a majority of people. This has other implications for his political science, but I think I will stop here.
Regardless of what I think are the personal pros/cons of his strategy, the jurisdiction in which marijuana man lived eventually decided to allocate some scarce political/moral resource to him. Doug Hughes was an incredible loser in the negative sum game of obtaining scarce political/moral resources and punishing one's enemies in the process. He may eventually be vindicated by the FAA on moral grounds, though he had to pay a steep price in the meantime (as I assume marijuana man already had; I recall him saying that he would go 'back to jail' as if he had already been).
Regardless of what I think are the personal pros/cons of Trump's strategy, his case (the case of political and moral allocation, not that of his legal trial) has yet to be decided. The Powers That Be will use every tool at their disposal to deny him any allocation of political/moral value, at least for now, even if that involves scouring the books for anything, even if that means going after him for something that would have disappeared as an issue for anyone else by twenty different offramps.
Riker tells me that the only answer liberalism gives to anyone who is unhappy with this current allocation of political/moral value is to vote people out. He tells me to not worry too much, because a majority of people are usually unhappy with the allocation of political/moral value anyway. He tells me only to worry when people start thinking that they're getting an even shittier deal by participating in the political system and acknowledging it as a suitable means by which to allocate scarce political/moral value. Unfortunately, this is what I hear when I hear Megyn Kelly talk to Tucker Carlson.
Epilogue
I sometimes get angry that so many people violate so many laws in ways that genuinely hurt others. I sometimes get angry that so many of those people are never prosecuted, due to twenty different offramps. I sometimes get angry that other bullshit laws exist and that people get unjustly prosecuted under them. I sometimes get angry that the most common way to play the political game is to punish one's enemies, making the whole thing a negative sum endeavor. I might also even get angry when some political losers start to reject the entire edifice that is built on things that I sometimes hate and get angry at. I used to get more upset at that last one; ya know, the whole 'damaging to our democracy' bit. And sure, I can still see how such degradation can occur, leading to all sorts of political dysentery. But man, I am starting to lean in the direction that when everything is obvious bullshit, "I get mad about every bullshit thing I see," might not be the way. After all, as the video says, I'm just some fuckin' guy, and probabilistically, I'm highly likely to be in the dissatisfied majority most of the time.
To be specific, at the time the process to get permission to enter the Capital SFRA involved a pretty lengthy flight planning session going over nearly every component of the flight path, and required certain telemetry types not present in most (maybe not allowed in?) ultralights; the White House and Capitol Hill (and a few surrounding areas) remain prohibited even if you do that. They've since added an online course. Non-standard (eg not straight-line direct-to) flight plans can get more complicated than even that -- I've heard joking-not-joking stories about aerial imaging groups having to bring a police officer on the flight with them.
To be 'fair', the FAA is a petty bitch. They're still the Powers That Be when it comes to aviation, but they're willing to be petty in other environments as well: there's a decent number of 2008-2013 enforcement against 'fat' ultralights. The FAA didn't do hangar-level inspections without a serious complaint first, but if an FSDO gets a complaint, or a FBO knew you weren't behaving well, those complaints and photographic evidence could come in pretty quick.
((This was somewhat complicated by a lot of two-seat light-weight aircraft going around in that timeframe, which were in a weird state until 2008ish.))
This isn't even always wrong: see the Trevor Jacobs thing for a situation where the FAA absolutely came down on him like a sack of bricks (including prison time!) because it was embarrassing for them, but he also could have done a hell of a lot of mischief.
Interesting. Any cites to criminal, felony cases? My quick internet search didn't come up with much but rumors that people were given reprimands, maybe fines, and told that they had to get rid of second seats (but that they didn't care so much if they were a little 'fat').
That's fair. Most recent cases usually just go after airman's certs or private pilot's licenses; criminal cases tend to only get involved when there's risk to passengers or to people on the ground, and even those are pretty rare.
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