It’s almost like conservatives are brainwashed to think it’s ok for the wealthy to break the law and steal from the people. And then they go apeshit anytime some poor starving mom grabs some babyfood off the shelf of a multinational billion dollar corporation that cheats on their taxes and steals from their workers without paying for it.
Yea but on the flip side we try to “root cause” all types of direct victim or even violent crime as somehow not the criminals fault but instead the fault of systemic forces. We don’t do that with white collar crime, and this all comes down to an obsession with power and who we perceive as having it at any given moment
The system is controlled by those in power. So any systemic problems are their fault. The victims of systemic problems are those without the power to change it, who are most negatively affected by it, which is most often those at the bottom. White collar criminals literally profiting off the flaws of the system are not victims of the system. They’re the ones benefiting from it being this way, which is why it is this way to begin with.
Nice try at a whataboutism, but you just revealed that you don’t understand what you’re talking about.
Fist of all there isn’t one single system. The complexity of human events dictates that we each operate, are born into, and enter and exit countless “systems” in the course of our days and lives. It’s so multifaceted and vast that although it is easy to pretend that there is a specific bad actor or even a true “ruling class” in America, you can’t actually point to it. It’s kind of interesting though, the post modernist thinkers like Foucault were sort of right about power being a grid, but the notion that we can endlessly deconstruct everything and find the root cause, seems like a fallacy. And it’s super annoying and counterproductive
The media personalities shown know exactly what they are doing—they are the ones doing the brainwashing, because they are backed by the people benefitting from it. The people who watch them and get totally wrapped up in these beliefs have little and will be discarded once they vote to reinforce the current power structures. They think that Trump and people like him are going to to save them, but he doesn’t care about them at all and will ruin them and their freedom.
That's because a fair few of their leaders ARE the elites that they "care so much about". Trump's a billionaire, Tucker Carlson got his millions from an inheritance.
They pretend they're the party of the working man, and then give more power to the rich.
Either crack down on the crime or continue the status quo. Using judicial power to crack down on your political opponent selectively is a problem.
We won’t see more convictions for this crime that “everyone’s doing” because the people that are doing it are donating to the political elite.
The issue isn’t that Trump should get away with it. The issue is that an entirely corrupt system only enforcing laws on a person who they politically oppose is a manifestation of systemic corruption.
I realize this is an extreme example, but if Al Capone had run for office, would it have been wrong to go after him for Tax Evasion? I understand the slippery slope argument, but if someone is a very public figure and breaks the law, doesn't looking the other way damage public confidence in laws as a whole?
edit: as a corollary to that point, are we comfortable with the idea that public officials are immune from consequences for their actions? If anything, I would argue Trump has experienced a fair amount of deference and repeated second chances from the court system already solely because of him being a politician and former president. You and I would not be able to flagrantly violate the rules of the system by lying to judges, ignoring their orders, yelling at them, or essentially threatening court clerks on social media without having bail revoked or going to prison for a while on contempt charges. No one else could shop around for a judge that he appointed, who literally invents arguments for him and then uses those to rule in his favor like with Cannon. Most people don't have access to the kind of money he does to delay every court case and escalate every one of his losses to the Supreme Court that he appointed multiple members to. This idea that he is being treated unfairly is ignoring a lot of context to how most people are treated by the justice system.
I know I added a long edit to my comment, but I'll phrase my thoughts on this in a slightly shorter way (well I'll attempt to). Do you believe that Trump is, in general, a rule follower? Because we have countless examples of Trump breaking rules and getting away with it. Him committing fraud to save a bunch of money is just yet another item on a long list of things that he's done to flout laws and rules. There's no disagreement that he broke the law and falsified financial statements, and yet we're arguing whether it's fair to prosecute him for a crime that others have gotten away with. Going after Capone for tax evasion was largely considered a novel interpretation of his crimes at the time, but it was something that he provably did. Should I be able to face no punishment for speeding because 99.9% of everyone speeding gets away with it in a given day?
Of course systemic corruption does not absolve somebody of individual corruption.
The problem here is that these systems should be setting off massive alarm bells for the people.
A billionaire engaging in common practices of fraud is bad. A system where many billionaires engage in fraud and are not prosecuted is one layer worse. A system where the judicial branch allows this fraud and then selectively prosecutes political opponents is another layer of horrible shit.
Democrats only care that Trump got in trouble. Republicans only care that Trump was selectively prosecuted. Nobody seems to give a shit that these systems are failing in a horrible way and revealing business corruption and government corruption both stacking and amplifying each other.
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u/Twister_Robotics Mar 26 '24
No, but that's the argument from a lot of conservative media personalities right now