All posts by Thomas L. Knapp

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Time to Stop Squeezing The Juice

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A few minutes after midnight on October 1,  authorities at Nevada’s Lovelock Correctional Center released O.J. Simpson on parole after the former football great had served nine years of a 33-year sentence for criminal conspiracy, kidnapping, assault, robbery, and using a deadly weapon.

Simpson, who faces several years of parole/probation restrictions, says he’d like to move back to Florida, where he lived before his conviction. Florida’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, who never misses an opportunity to grandstand, says that “should not be an option.” “Our state,” she whines, “should not become a country club for this convicted criminal.”

Bondi, of course, is very different from Simpson, and not just in skin tone or sex. He was convicted of something that wouldn’t be considered a crime in any sane society. She hasn’t even been charged with the real crime she undeniably committed (soliciting and accepting a bribe, er, “campaign contribution,” from the Trump Foundation for keeping Florida out of a multi-state fraud lawsuit against Trump University).

Yes, O.J. Simpson is a “convicted criminal.” But what was he convicted of? Demanding the return of stolen property while someone with a gun was present . He claimed not to know that two of the people accompanying him were armed, but even if he knew, let me repeat the two key words, “stolen property.”

In the normal course of things, Simpson would likely have filed a criminal complaint or a civil suit to retrieve the property. Why didn’t he?

Well, more than a decade before, Los Angeles police had unsuccessfully attempted to frame him for the murder of his ex-wife and a friend. No, I’m not saying he didn’t do it, but LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman and others artificially created a case that fell apart under scrutiny instead of objectively investigating the crime. I recommend J. Neil Schulman’s excellent The Frame of the Century? for a more skeptical look at the case.

Then, after his acquittal, the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman used the civil court system to rob Simpson of a prospective $33.5 million in damages for the same crime a jury had acquitted him of committing.

Why on Earth would anyone expect O.J. Simpson to trust the police, or the civil court system, to have his back on a matter of stolen property? If he wanted it back, he had to get it himself … and when he did, the criminal justice system came down on him like a ton of bricks yet again, levying a sentence that was clearly enhanced by a full order of magnitude as “payback” for the crime he’d been acquitted of.

Love him or hate him, it’s clear that OJ Simpson has paid the price, and then some, for the acts he’s actually been proven to have committed. It’s time for the Goldman and Simpson families, Pam Bondi, and everyone else, to stop using a 70-year-old man as a public punching bag and let him live out the remainder of his life in peace rather than in penury.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

The Russia-Blamers Think You’re Stupid

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Communist Books -- stock photo from Max Pixel. CC0 Public Domain License.
Communist Books — stock photo from Max Pixel. CC0 Public Domain License.

“Russian operatives used Facebook ads to exploit America’s racial and religious divisions,” the Washington Post claims in a September 25 headline.

Over at The Daily Beast, Dean Obeidallah explains “How Russian Hackers Used My Face to Sabotage Our Politics and Elect Trump.”

And US Senator James Lankford (R-OK) thinks that “the Russians and their troll farms” (as opposed to Donald Trump and   professional football players) are behind the current “take a knee” kerfuffle between Donald Trump and professional football players.

Because, you know, Americans never had rowdy disagreements with each other over race and religion until last year, and wouldn’t be having them now if not for those dirty, no-good Russian hackers who stole the 2016 presidential election from the second most hated candidate in history, on behalf of the most hated candidate in history, operating through subterfuge to achieve the outcome that some of us predicted months in advance, long before anyone mentioned Russian hackers.*

Evidence? Who needs evidence? The people who hated the outcome and have been railing against it for nearly a year now have told us what happened, and why, and whodunit, and they’d never lie to us about something like that, would they? They lied about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction, and about illegal wiretapping by the NSA, and about a thousand other things, but THIS is DIFFERENT.

Keep in mind that when all the most wild and baseless accusations (e.g. that !THEM RUSSIANS! hacked the voting machines) are discarded, the basic claim remaining is this: By spreading “fake news” through social media, !THEM RUSSIANS! fooled a bunch of Americans into voting the wrong way.

Let’s assume for a moment that the basic claim is true, although so far the actual evidence indicates a tiny propaganda operation in the scale of things. If it’s true, the conclusion it points to is:

American voters are morons who can be gamed into doing anything by anyone with the ability to buy ads on Facebook and Twitter.

I didn’t say that. Russian hackers didn’t say that, at least in public. That’s what the propagators of the new Red Scare are claiming.

If the American electorate is really as abjectly stupid as the “blame the Russians” crowd insists, it seems to me that instead of blaming the Russians, they should get to work on either making the electorate smarter or coming up with a system that doesn’t leave important political decisions in the hands of the gullible. Just sayin’ …

*In May of 2016, I predicted that Donald Trump would carry every state Mitt Romney carried in 2012, plus Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. I didn’t predict Wisconsin and Iowa, but 48 of 50 states from six months out ain’t too shabby, is it?

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

Privacy and Politics: The Hypocrisy of the Surveillance Statists

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The New York Times reports that at least six members of the Trump administration used personal email accounts to discuss White House matters.

Given president Donald Trump’s campaign and post-campaign harping (as the Times puts it) on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s illegal use of a private server and mishandling of classified information, it’s unsurprising to hear charges of hypocrisy from Democratic quarters. But the hypocrisy here  a matter of  political class elitism, not partisan politics. Those in power, regardless of party, want to know what you’re doing, but think what they’re doing is none of your business (except when they send you the bill for all of it).

The US government and its state and local subsidiaries operate the largest and most far-reaching surveillance apparatus in the history of humankind. Their intelligence and police agencies intercept, analyze and catalog our phone calls and emails, create and install malware on our computers to keep track of what we do online, and watch us via satellite and over vast networks of  cameras in public areas. They track our activities using our Social Security numbers, drivers’ licenses, car VINs and license plates, banking and employment information, and electronic device IP address and MAC IDs. Modern America puts the Third Reich’s death camp tattoo system and the Soviet Union’s internal passport scheme to shame in this respect.

Whenever we mere mortals notice and complain about any aspect of this surveillance state, the response consists of operatic appeals to “national security,” “fighting crime,” and other variations on the theme of “we’re just trying to protect you.”

But whenever an Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning or Julian Assange pulls back the curtain, revealing  crimes committed by the political class, all hell breaks loose. How DARE these pesky whistle-blowers show the serfs that  their emperor isn’t just naked, but also killing and stealing on a scale that would make Ted Bundy and Bernie Madoff blush? And how dare the serfs notice?

Excuse me for a moment while I break out the world’s smallest violin and compose “Dirge for the Lost Privacy of Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, Jared Kushner, Stephen Bannon, Reince Priebus, Gary Cohn, Ivanka Trump and Stephen Miller.”

So long as American politicians and bureaucrats continue to put the rest of us under a magnifying glass, they deserve no sympathy when they  get caught trying to hide their own actions from public view.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY