How Liberal Lawyers Have Unwittingly Energized Conservatives
How Some Liberals Repeatedly Misread the Mood of the Populace and Bring lawsuits which Augment the Power of Conservatives
By
David Gottfried
The New York Times of January 14, 2024 reported that support for Trump has dramatically increased among college-educated Republicans, that voters think that Trump has been the victim of excessive and misguided litigation and that Trump’s political resurrection began on March 30, 2023, when a Manhattan Grand Jury indicted Trump for paying hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels. 1
Without doubt, Trump is an egregious miscreant, criminal and, most ominously, a fascist to the core. However, the “liberal” media was true to form when it boosted Trump by making Stormy Daniels’ sleazy porn-hush-money-adultery suit headline news, suggested that Trump’s sexual transgressions were vital issues on a par with nuclear weaponry, and gloated over Trump’s travails in another sex-suit, in which Jean Carroll won millions of dollars in damages, with no eye witnesses corroborating her claims, for Trump’s alleged groping, many years ago, in a department store dressing room. Next to inciting the assassination of Mike Pence, suborning perjury, planning an insurrection and stopping law enforcement from sending armed forces to the Capital to suppress the insurrection (Please Read This Footnote) 2, Trump’s bachelor party behavior was a sexual romp out of a Doris Day-Rock Hudson movie.
Many people reasoned: They couldn’t get Trump for collaborating with Russia against America so they are suing Trump for sex.
How and Why Black Pride was Mutilated in the Course of Outlawing Segregation
While I was reading the aforementioned article in Today’s New York Times, my mind hurtled back in time to an evening in New York University Law School in the early 1980’s. A legal luminary from the Civil Rights struggles of the Fifties and Sixties came to speak. Throughout his presentation, my fellow law students, uniformly liberal if not socialistic, wildly acclaimed this old giant from the valiant and valorous past. Unfortunately, my fellow law students were so busy patting themselves on the back for their leftist rectitude and imagined perspicacity that they were deaf, dumb and blind to his grief for what had been lost.
The litigating giant told us that to prove that segregated schooling was not “separate but equal” but rather “separate and unequal, liberal litigators had to put black educators on the witness stand and humiliate them by demonstrating that they were largely inferior to white teachers. (Because black teachers in the South, in the 50’s, were usually deprived of educational opportunities, their inferior credentials were to be expected.)
Very simply, the civil rights movement, to a large measure, was successful by shaming and skewering the finest members of the black community, the middle-class black professionals who had patiently, tirelessly, labored to help poor blacks surmount their subjugation with education and hard work.
Of course, fighting segregation was a laudatory goal. However, I don’t think it takes that much brain power to realize that a poor black child might find it easier to learn when his teacher is also black and that a white Southern Teacher, in the 1950’s, is apt to remind him that black boys, who look at a white woman the wrong way, are apt to be mutilated and killed.
How “Brave” Liberal Giants Brought Suits to Enforce School Bussing, which neither Whites nor Blacks Wanted, and How this Hammered the Final Nails into the Coffin of Liberal, Sixties Dreams
White liberals were also oblivious to the psychological and political issues lurking in litigation when school bussing was hotly contested in the 60’s and 70’s.
School bussing was designed to achieve integration when students were segregated. (Most students are segregated for the simple reason that some neighborhoods happen to be primarily white, and some neighborhoods happen to be black.) School bussing entailed the forced transport of black and white children, sometimes for considerable distances, to neighborhoods where they could be seated with plenty of children from the “opposing” race.
The great majority of White parents were opposed to forced bussing to achieve school desegregation. A very substantial majority of black parents also opposed forced bussing. Nevertheless, that which had been concretized in writing and promulgated by men in Washington was imbued with ideas bordering on the supernatural: Forced Bussing had to be good, even if it seemed revolting, because it was the will of Democracy, the fruit of our finest lawyers and the living testament of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy (And I don’t recall either of these men ever spending any time praising forced bussing.) The liberal litigators who brought suits to forcibly bus students seemed unmindful that a) the idea that blacks needed to be seated next to whites to learn seemed racist, b) that if blacks internalized the notion that they needed whites to learn, it might produce feelings of inferiority, c) that forced bussing was apt to increase racial tensions and d) that whites would be more prone to vote for conservative or racist candidates and that blacks, disaffected with the patronizing character of white liberalism, might decide not to vote.
Of course, our “liberal” media never suggested that real progressives might have argued for something saner and truer to progressive politics: Fund majority black schools with more resources. Of course, such a remedy couldn’t be considered because conservatives conned the public into believing that progressives were irredeemable tax and spend liberals.
(The phrase “tax and spend liberals” is so deeply engrained in the nation’s psyche that when I argued, in 1985, for increased funding for AIDS research, a political opponent of mine, at a Democratic club, said, “There you go again, always wanting to throw money at a problem like a dissolute tax and spend liberal.” How the fuck were we to research AIDS without spending money: Were we supposed to steal electron microscopes (they have the magnifying power sufficient to visualize viruses) and capture researchers and make them work for free ???)
Hostility to forced bussing was so intense that in the 1972 Democratic Presidential primary in Florida, the segregationist candidate, George Wallace, won even Dade County, Florida, the seat of Miami, and in the fall elections, Democratic sympathy for proponents of bussing helped Richard Nixon win every state in the nation save Massechusetts and the District of Columbia.
Of course, the litigation brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith assumes the gravest importance, and I wish it well. However, spare us any more litigation pertaining to Trump’s libido. It’s a lot of tawdry bullshit, and it plays into Trump’s hands for the reasons stated above.
“How College-Educated Republicans learned to Love Trump Again,” by Michael C. Bender, The New York Times, January 14, 2023.
Actually, my powers of prognostication were fairly good because I predicted, on Substack, on around April 3, 2023, in “Damn the Masochistic Dems: They May Make Trump Win in 2024,” that suing Trump for giving Daniels hush money would increase his poll numbers (and according to the aforementioned Times article, that’s just what happened):
“I should not be surprised by Democratic self-abuse. They have a long and sordid pornographic history of shoving 13-inch dildos into themselves.
Trump’s failure to report payments to Stormy Daniels to shut up about her sexual games with Donald did, perhaps, amount to a violation of campaign finance law reporting requirements. But everyone, with the exception of legal grinds on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, see it as a sex story. And they reason: Many Americans voted for him in 2020 knowing full well that he was a gaudy philanderer (Remember the tape of Trump saying, “Grab ‘em by the pussy”) so his hush money payments are an irrelevant diversion.”
https://davidgottfried.substack.com/p/damn-the-masochistic-dems-they-may
The former Republican Governor of Maryland, a Mr. Hogan, has said that he wanted to send the Maryland National Guard to the Capital to defend it from the MAGA rioters. He said that someone in Washington told him he could not do that. He did not identify that person, and this is the most damning part of the insurrection story, and it’s so serious that neither the media, nor any representatives in Congress, nor the prosecutors suing Trump will investigate this issue, let alone discuss it. If we got live testimony demonstrating that Trump, or his agents or deputies, stopped Larry Hogan, and/or any other parties, from sending forces to the capital to stop the rioters, the conviction of Trump, Il Duce Rudy Mussolini and company would be a slam dunk.