You can bet that when violent Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters are brought to trial, a quite rare occurrence, they won’t be asked to renounce their beliefs in exchange for leniency. But not so for the first January 6 trespasser to be sentenced, even though she’s a grandmother guilty only of entering the Capitol and peacefully strolling about for a few minutes. So much for equality under the law.
In fact, Anna Morgan-Lloyd, a 49-year-old from Indiana, “got the same message that was delivered to Chinese dissidents and ‘bad elements’ during Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: confess to thoughtcrimes, embrace the state-sanctioned ideology, and you will be shown mercy,” writes commentator Thomas Lifson. “In the case of Morgan-Lloyd, the message was delivered to her by her own defense lawyer, a public defender paid by taxpayers. And it worked. She received three years’ probation, a $500 fine, and no incarceration beyond the two days she had spent in jail following her arrest.”
The truth is that Lloyd’s experience will seem spooky to anyone acquainted with history. As Julie Kelly wrote last Wednesday in an American Greatness piece titled “Deprogramming of January 6 Defendants Is Underway”:
My lawyer has given me names of books and movies to help me see what life is like for others in our country. I’ve learned that even though we live in a wonderful country things still need to improve. People of all colors should feel as safe as I do to walk down the street.”
That passage is part book report, part white privilege mea culpa submitted to a federal court this month by Anna Morgan-Lloyd, one of the more than 500 Americans arrested for her involvement in the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6.
… On Wednesday, Lloyd, who has a clean criminal record, pleaded guilty to one count of “parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building” — but not before she consented to undergo a reeducation exercise at the urging of her court-appointed lawyer. (Like many January 6 defendants, Lloyd does not have the means to hire a private attorney.)
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Both Lifson and Kelly make the likely safe assumption that Lloyd’s lawyer, D.C.-based defense attorney Heather Shaner, doesn’t share the beliefs of the January 6 trespassers she’s representing. After all, as Kelly also informs, “In an interview with Huffington Post, Shaner explained her belief that ‘this is the most wonderful country in the world, it’s been great for all kinds of immigrant groups, except for the fact that it was born of genocide of the Native Americans and the enslavement of people.’”
(Talk about a left-handed compliment — and being dead wrong. As I explained here, there was no “genocide” of American Indians. Moreover, as one of history’s oldest institutions, slavery was once status quo throughout the world until Western lands such as Britain and the United States outlawed it. Given its ubiquity and viewing matters within the leftist world view’s context, how many nations, then, weren’t “born of slavery”?)
But this all appears born of Critical Race Theory, the latest intellectual fad of the unintellectual. And Lloyd supposedly is learning well how many fingers that figurative government agent is holding up. As Kelly also tells us:
“I have had many political and ethical discussions with Anna Lloyd,” Shaner wrote in her motion agreeing to the plea and probation for Lloyd. “I tendered a booklist to her. She has read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Just Mercy, and Schindler’s List to educate herself about ‘government policy’ toward Native Americans, African Americans and European Jews. We have discussed the books and also about the responsibility of an individual when confronting ‘wrong.'”
Shaner also told the court that Lloyd watched the “Burning Tulsa” documentary on the History Channel as well as “Mudbound,” a story of two families, one black and one white, living on the same property after World War II.
My, that’s quite a curriculum. Things were in a way easier during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, points out Lifson, with a somewhat shorter reading list: It was just “Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, The Thoughts of Chairman Mao.”
But, hey, just “affirm that this is an awful, racist country and that you are the beneficiary of white privilege, and you can escape lengthy imprisonment for ‘parading’ in the Capitol,” Lifson also writes. “While others at other times have invaded and disrupted hearings, and wrought far more havoc (the Kavanaugh hearings, for example) with little or no punishment at all, and certainly no requirements for thought reform.”
Then there’s the following moment, which Lifson correctly states smacks of a Cultural Revolution “struggle session.” Kelly again:
During her sentencing hearing on Wednesday, Lloyd broke down while apologizing for her actions. “I apologize to the court, to the American people, to my family,” she told Lamberth. “I was there to support Trump peacefully and am ashamed that it became a savage display of violence.” She said she’s never experienced racial negativity but “realizes many people do.” She was not charged with any racially motivated crime.
Really, it’s a bit reminiscent of the 1995 film Braveheart’s torture scene, during which freedom fighter William Wallace was told he’d receive mercy if he just got on his knees and kissed the royal emblem (video below. Relevant portion begins at 2:25).
Of course, this was just art imitating life, as pledging loyalty to a leader or belief has often been required as a condition for leniency in many times and places. In our country, we traditionally might view it as a mitigating factor in sentencing if a defendant exhibited contrition, but generally just when having committed actual crimes (e.g., rape, murder).
The exceptions to this were perhaps cases of neo-Nazis or the like who committed serious crimes and then, seeking leniency, might have claimed (sincerely or not) that they were in the grip of beliefs they now know to be false.
In Lloyd’s case, however, it’s not just that all she did was trespass, but that the demand isn’t only that she show remorse for having trespassed. Rather, her minor infraction is being used by hard-core, hatred-driven ideologues as an opportunity to put the hapless grandmother in a re-education-camp situation in which she can be coerced into accepting their dogma. Worse still and as so often is the case in history, their dogma is a lie.
This is, of course, what the Left wants to do with all who dissent from their ideology. Its minions will just need to find pretexts to do so — that is, until they have enough power to render pretexts unnecessary.
