Notes From Upstream: Guilty, Guilty, Guilty, Guilty
Is there no end to the left's homicide chic?
Some years ago, a friend who was launching a web magazine asked me to write for it. His magazine never happened, but I did research several potential stories. One was the defense case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, accused and convicted of murdering Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Mumia’s defense committee has been trying since 1982 to get his conviction overturned.
When I looked into the case, I found not only the expected leftist pro-Mumia advocacy, but also a Daniel Faulkner website.
It has been the Daniel Faulkner website and not any of the pro-Mumia propaganda which provides transcripts of the trial and other legal proceedings. That’s a major clue as to who’s telling the truth. And, after reviewing the transcripts and other materials, I drew two conclusions:
• Mumia received a fair trial; and,
• Mumia was guilty, in fact, “incredibly guilty,” to quote the jurors from the Mel Brooks movie The Producers:
The outrageous murder and the loathsome pro-Mumia lies moved me to buy a Daniel Faulkner tee shirt and button. I wore out the tee shirt, but I still have the button.
It’s too great a digression to go into the details of that case, but if you want to test my two conclusions, you can read all the materials or the Faulkner family’s own book:
The Mumia experience got me wondering. We’ve had dozens of political defense cases in America. How many of their defendants were guilty?
All, it turned out, or at least all the most famous ones, like these:
Sacco and Vanzetti, of murder
Haymarket Martyrs, of murder
Angela Davis, of conspiracy, murder, and kidnapping
Alger Hiss, of perjury about his espionage
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, of espionage
Mumia, of murder
Leonard Peltier, of murder
Clarence Darrow, of jury bribery (Darrow was a relative piker)
After substantial research, I can opine with confidence that every defendant listed above was guilty as charged.
Which reminds me of this notorious Seinfeld scene. Jerry doubts that Elaine could have faked her orgasms with him. But she explains,
So, if anyone asks about the guilt of Mumia; or Angela Davis; or Alger Hiss; or Leonard Peltier—One can echo Elaine and answer with confidence: “Guilty, Guilty, Guilty, Guilty.”
So why do leftists persist in pushing defense committees for the guilty?
The question reminds me of the time the young woman cutting my hair—Karin—complained through the entire haircut about her lousy, lying, on-again off-again boyfriend. Then she asked me why so many men lie so much.
To which I replied, “Because it works.”
Like Karin’s crappy boyfriend, leftists lie because it works.
But isn’t lying immoral?
This may be a tiresome cliché, but it is true. Socialists and communists really do believe that the end justifies the means. After all, their end is a perfect society, without war, bigotry, alienation, relative poverty or any of the other evils human beings have been suffering since the last Ice Age.
Surely, a political goal that wonderful justifies any means.
And to achieve that political goal requires a political movement.
Naturally, a movement requires leaders.
And what’s a leader without followers?
Just as militaries wage war one military campaign at a time, the Left organizes its war on civilization one political campaign at a time. And as a political campaign, a political defense committee is ideal for gathering followers.
If the accused is guilty, so what? As SDSers used to say, “The issue is never the issue; the issue is always the revolution.”
They were themselves followers of their own leader Saul Alinsky, who laid out 13 principles in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals. Two of his rules apply with particular force to political defense cases:
Rule 4: Make The Enemy Live Up To Its Own Book Of Rules
Rule 13: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
Let’s take Rule 4 first. In case you were in doubt, the “enemy” is the United States, along with our legal system, our culture and the western civilization for which our country is the principal exponent and defender.
Our basic “book of rules” is the United States Constitution.
As John Adams famously pointed out, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
But Alinsky was writing for people who are by and large irreligious, except to the extent that their ideologies serve as alternate religions.
True?
Thus, for example, we see leftist lawyers and their judges follow Alinsky’s rules by overwhelming our courts and our immigration enforcement lawyers with bogus Habeas Corpus petitions and abusive contempt proceedings, as Bill Glahn explained here:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2026/02/nothing-but-contempt.php
The same exploitative approach to our legal system drives the Lawyer-Defense Committee Complex.
For their purposes a guilty defendant is not a negative but a positive.
Conscientious authorities are more likely to insist on punishing someone they know to be guilty no matter how hard and long the criminal’s supporters press.
The ongoing conflict provides the defense committee an ongoing organizing and recruiting tool. It becomes a license to print followers.
Now the second selected rule, Rule 13: Pick The Target, Freeze it, Personalize It, And Polarize It
People who have trouble understanding abstract principles can grasp a story featuring good guys and bad guys.
In the Defense Committee story, the cops and the prosecutors are the bad guys. The criminal is the good guy they are persecuting. They are framing him, concocting false evidence, suborning perjury, and doing all the other bad things bad guys do.
They are Racists, they are Fascists, they are Nazis.
But they spin only hagiographic tales about their killers. Marxist Professor Herbert Marcuse called Angela Davis “an extraordinary student not only because of her intelligence and her eagerness to learn … but also because she had that sensitivity, that human warmth without which all learning and all knowledge remain ‘abstract,’ merely ‘professional,’ and eventually irrelevant.”
Sacco and Vanzetti were simple, sweet-natured working men whose anarchism was merely a misplaced naivete and in no way sinister. Mumia was a “community activist.”
I had a lawyer friend who prosecuted murder cases in DC. He hated trying these cases. Often the evidence for guilt was so overwhelming and so dispositive that the defense’s only option was to claim that it came from a racist frame-up. Beyond just proving the case, his job included having to fight through nonstop vilification about what a tool of racism he was.
Other Advantages For The Left
Along with their other benefits, political defense campaigns provide the occasion for handy slogans sufficiently simple-minded for entertainers to spout. The slogans usually include comfort words like “free,” as in:
“Free Angela Davis”
“Free Mumia Now”
“Free Leonard Peltier”
Once in a while slogan-makers replace “free” with the more heart-tugging word “save.”
“Save Sacco and Vanzetti”
“Save the Rosenbergs”
The Chinese Communists are particularly adept at coming up with short punchy slogans. They have a term for it (提法), which translates into English as “TIFA” (“This Is Final Answer”).
During the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s Red Guards killed at least two million people and persecuted at least 100 million others, while waving Red Books filled with empty TIFA such as these:
“Serve the People”
“Combat Liberalism”
“To Rebel is Justified”
Maybe those TIFA were catchier in Mandarin.
I have seen many the student radical stumbling across campus engrossed in Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, which also featured my favorite communist Deep Thought:
A frog in a well says, ‘The sky is no bigger than the mouth of the well.’ That is untrue, for the sky is not just the size of the mouth of the well. If it said, ‘A part of the sky is the size of the mouth of a well,’ that would be true, for it tallies with the facts.”
Who can argue with that?
The days of failed struggle to save Sacco and Vanzetti are long gone. Since leftists have taken over the Democrat Party, they have graduated from defending their criminals to freeing them.
Democrat President Bill Clinton pardoned billionaire Marc Rich after Rich used a trifling portion of the billions he had stolen to bribe Clinton.
Democrat President Joe Biden commuted the sentence for one of the slimiest criminals ever, a judge who took bribes to sentence children to prison.
“President Joe Biden commuted the remainder of Conahan’s 17-year prison sentence on as part of a mass clemency action for nearly 1,500 individuals who had been released to home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conahan, along with another judge, was convicted in 2011 of accepting $2.8 million in kickbacks from private juvenile detention center owners in exchange for sending over 2,300 children—some as young as eight—to those facilities, often for minor offenses and without proper legal representation.”
Did you catch that? At the time Biden pardoned him, Conahan wasn’t even in prison; he was merely confined to his home. And a comfortable home it was, we can be sure.
Of course, if leftists in power refuse to prosecute a criminal in the first place, they won’t even need any pardon or clemency later. For example, here’s the lovely and talented Shellyne Rodriguez, the “nutty professor” who held a machete up to a reporter’s neck.
“Get the f–k away from my door or I’m gonna chop you up with this machete!” Rodriguez shouted in the caught-on-video assault before retreating back inside, leaving Fenton and a [New York] Post photographer dumbstruck.”
No problem. Her Democrat cronies gave her a sweetheart deal with no jail time.
But at least someone has been punished—in this case, the people of the Bronx. New York City has awarded Rodriguez $407,000 for this crap work of her crap “art.”
Money quote from The Artist herself:
“If abolition is not solely about what we dismantle, but also about what we build in its stead, then what monuments or points of gathering will we, the collective body of the dispossessed who make life on the periphery of empire, make for ourselves as stewards of our own histories and futures,” she told Hyperallergic in November.
It’s only getting worse. Contemporary leftists not only have freed their criminals and rewarded them with grotesque sums for their grotesquer emissions, but they have also elected treasonous senile criminals to America’s highest office.
From lying on behalf of the guilty to pardoning the guilty to electing the guilty, it’s only a short step to prosecuting the innocent. Consider Kyle Rittenhouse, George Zimmerman, and Daniel Penny, all threatened with personal destruction for defending themselves against criminals from favored constituencies.
Then there’s Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin, still stuck in prison. They got him and got him good. So far, at least. But that’s another post.
Max Cossack lives with his wife Susan in a dusty little village in Arizona with two cats who have mastered the craft of looking innocent no matter what mischief they’ve been up to.
Also, in case you missed it, he recently released his brand-new Max Cossack novel Deep Fakery,available in eBook or paperback on Amazon.
(He can’t post any cat photo here. His wife Susan has dibs on all their cat photos for her own post tomorrow.)
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The fact that incredibly guilty Mumia was convicted nearly A HALF CENTURY ago for first degree murder and is still getting three squares on the public dime when he should have "ridden the lightning" by 1983 is infuriating.
"Liberate Luigi!"
I agree with you on all points except this one:
"Socialists and communists really do believe that the end justifies the means. After all, their end is a perfect society, without war, bigotry, alienation, relative poverty or any of the other evils human beings have been suffering since the last Ice Age."
The end is control. The perfect society is the one where they and their ilk control everything, and do not answer for anything. Justification for why they 'should' control will vary across the manifold sins of hubris and self-aggrandizement characteristic of elitist experts smarter and more caring than members of the unwashed masses, but that they will control does not vary. Human suffering is irrelevant. The end justifies the means is a deflection from the truth.