Why Due Process Died and Who Killed It

President Trump appeared to weigh in on the resignation of two White House staffers accused of domestic abuse Saturday, bemoaning that lives are being destroyed by “a mere allegation.”

“Peoples [sic] lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new,” he tweeted. “There is no recovery for someone falsely accused – life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?”

It’s a good question.

But the issue runs deeper. Due process is a legal term. It refers to a legal requirement that the government must respect all legal rights that are owed to a person.

 

Due process is what our government shows to illegal immigrants and terrorists, as well as to people who support Democrats. It’s what you get if you’re a member of a politically connected victim group — black, gay, transgender, Muslim. For everyone else, not so much.

For due process to operate in law, reason has to dominate the minds and hearts of individual human beings. As reason declines, due process goes with it. That’s what we see happening.

Reason refers to the willingness and ability to put all relevant facts over and above emotions, particularly initial emotions and bias.

The vast majority of our media, intellectual and cultural institutions, such as universities, are overwhelmingly and unforgivably, irredeemably biased.

The problem is worse than President Trump’s question, or the most exasperated of his Tweets, even suggests.

The fact we’re even talking about a “Russia collusion” scandal for which virtually no evidence exists is the most obvious proof of today’s complete lack of due process along with the total erosion of reason where government and politics are concerned.

Watergate had evidence and in those days, the media searched for proof. Today, the media continually hurls accusations at Trump and Republicans; the media feels no obligation to find and present evidence to support their slanderous claims. And when they find evidence suggesting or proving Democrats were involved in the very collusion they stamp on Republicans, they count on a compliant and unthinking population to say, “Wow, so Trump’s to blame.”

Going by a process of reason, there’s evidence to support that people like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton abused their power to foster bias and harassment against their opposition in the 2016 election. The more evidence emerges, the more the irredeemably dishonest and biased media runs headlines suggesting precisely the opposite of what’s true.

Orwell’s 1984 didn’t predict something like this.

For decades, many Americans have feared a dictatorship would take hold here. It hasn’t happened. But something in its own way just as bad — if not worse — did occur. The media turned into the kind of blind, nonobjective mouthpiece for one side that normally you only find in a dictatorship. Hitler had it, Soviet Russia had it, and dictatorships like North Korea, Venezuela and (to a lesser degree) China do it today.

In America, it’s all voluntary. Millions of people bow their heads and assume the media is right no matter how many times in polls they claim to believe it’s all false and biased. That’s why President Trump finds no evidence of due process. It’s still part of our system of government. But it’s no longer part of our culture, particularly in the people to whom we turn for intellectual guidance.

It’s a dictatorship by default. Perhaps the first in human history, but we’ve got it.

It takes self-confidence and the use of reasoning on the part of “ordinary people” to see through the sheer dishonesty of these totally false media narratives that function like a dictatorship. On the bright side, millions more are doing so, more than ever before. President Trump’s election could never have happened without that startling and positive trend.

Unless this trend sustains itself and grows, however, America will not be able to save itself from these disingenuous and deceitful hacks at places like CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC, and all the rest. If we let them, in their conceited war against reason and objective reality, they will bring down our once great society.

Only if we let them.

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