The Trump saga continues.
It's still the Trump show. WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES

At around 9:40 am, Steve Bannon, a crook and former adviser to former President Donald Trump, appeared at the FBI's Washington Field Office "to turn himself in." He is charged with criminal contempt of Congress. He refused to play ball with the House committee investigating the January 6 coup attempt. Before entering the building, Bannon stated to the press buzzing around him: "We're taking down the Biden regime." Clearly, the Trump saga is far from over.

But CNN, a news organization that during the Trump years found that the line between left and right American politics had moved so far to the right that it was no longer in the center-right but completely in the left's zone, got to the heart of the Bannon matter in this manner: "He is expected to appear in court Monday afternoon. The case has been referred to District Judge Carl Nichols, who was appointed by Trump." Meaning, he is one of the judges Mitch McConnell stuffed the legal system with during Trump's time in power.

What's now in the open is the illusion that American courts are anywhere close to Justitia, the blindfolded and scales-holding and sword-gripping Roman goddess of legal fairness. The understanding is that a judge in any American court, from the top to the bottom, has a political opinion that directly will inform their legal decisions.


And this is why it's not a surprise for the black public to find the star of Kyle Rittenhouse's murder trial is not Rittenhouse or one of his three victims but the one-sided judge, Bruce E. Schroeder.

The big moments in this case, which heard its closing statements today, were primarily supplied by the judge's jokes about the text messages on his phones or Asian food. The explanation for Schroeder levity is found in the way he entered the murder trail (by denying "two requests by prosecutors to issue an arrest warrant and raise the bail of Kyle Rittenhouse" because he was certain the boy would not break the law); and the way he closed it (by dismissing Rittenhouse's misdemeanor gun charge, which "carries up to 12 months in jail"). Indeed, legal experts thought the misdemeanor was the only charge that had a chance in this bastard of a kangaroo court. Now it is gone. It will certainly not be lost on the left that Schroeder is an elected official who has faced no opposition in the past three Kenosha County Circuit Court races.

By the way, I don't think Rittenhouse should have been tried for murder as an adult. He is a child, and there's a huge difference between an adult and what Rittenhouse is, a boy. The question that only matters for society in this case is: Why are machine guns so accessible to minors? If you read the law prohibiting children in Wisconsin from owning the weapons of mass killings, it is indeed fuzzy. One would expect such an obvious matter as this to be clear, but it's not. And so kids are in fact permitted to open-carry machine guns in Wisconsin. This is the point upon which the public's attention should be focused. The rest is really none of its business, but one that should be managed by a social service system that protects the child's name.

But if you survey this Monday from its middle, you will see all around other court decisions and appearances that are favorable to the left or the right. There is the decision in Connecticut's Fairfield District Superior Court that finds the far-right conspiracy-monger Alex Jones "liable for defamation in Sandy Hook 'giant hoax' case." There's the decision in Georgia's Glynn County Superior Court that permitted the Reverend Jesse Jackson to sit with the parents of the black man who, early last year, was killed while jogging in a Georgia suburb, Ahmaud Arbery. The lawyer representing "one of the three white men charged with murdering" Arbery, Kevin Gough, stated: “We don’t want any more Black pastors coming in here." He was referring to Al Sharpton, and now it seems a flood (100!) of famous black pastors are entering or are ready to enter this Georgia courthouse.

Even here in our own backyard, a politically charged court decision was made today in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Three judges reactivated a lawsuit filed against City Councilmember Kshama Sawant by two police officers involved in the "2016 fatal shooting of Che Taylor." The white officers claim that the brown socialist defamed them when she described the shooting as “a blatant murder at the hands of police.”

Lewis Kamb of the Seattle Times writes that the "U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman had dismissed Spaulding’s and Miller’s third amended complaint in December 2020, after ruling it had failed to adequately claim that Sawant’s remarks were 'of and concerning' them." Spaulding and Miller made it concern them. This is why there's nothing but politics in this case.

But Seattle at this moment has a segment of the business community that sees Sawant as the source of most of its profit-making problems. And this is exactly how Seattle Times' explained its endorsement of Sawant's recall: "[She] has long been an outspoken voice for socialist ideals with an utter disregard for the city’s business community." There you go. No need to say more, or read beyond this sentence, which opens the paper's endorsement.

Class struggle is real. It's in our policing; it's in our courts.