Once again, this isn’t hypocrisy, it’s hierarchy. And it amounts to a threat: Imagine what we can do to you.
The latest indictment of former President Donald Trump is even more outlandish than Jack Smith’s blatant attempt to criminalize free speech. The indictment Monday out of Fulton County, Georgia, criminalizes mundane activities like asking for a phone number, texting, encouraging people to watch a televised hearing, and reserving a room at the Georgia capitol.
These activities, according to Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis, run afoul of the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute. As far as Willis is concerned, Trump’s legal efforts to challenge the election results in Georgia amounted to a criminal conspiracy, with Trump as the criminal mastermind. What that means, outlandishly, is that every phone call or tweet related to those legal efforts, every step Trump and his team took to press their legal case, counts as “an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.”
This is of course crazy. As more than a few people have noted since the charges dropped, according to Willis’ standard every major Democrat should be in prison on racketeering charges — including Hillary Clinton but especially Stacey Abrams, who has made a career out of denying that she lost the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election.
So yes, the hypocrisy is stupendous and blatant. But let me suggest that decrying the hypocrisy here is a loser’s game. What you see in these anti-Trump indictments is not hypocrisy, it’s hierarchy. We all became familiar with this concept during the Covid pandemic. Gathering for church, even outside, was against the law, but mass rioting in the streets was OK — so long as you were rioting for racial justice. Ordinary people had to let their elderly loved ones die alone and were not even allowed to bury them, yet thousands attended the funeral and memorial services for secular saint George Floyd.
Perhaps nothing better captured the hierarchy-not-hypocrisy concept than a photo of Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the annual Met Gala in September 2021 wearing a white gown with “tax the rich” scrawled on its backside. Set aside the idiocy of the stunt itself.
