Cagle World

When I learned that Josh Kruger had been murdered in Philadelphia last week week, I felt the same sense of shock that most people experienced at hearing the news.

The media community in the Delaware Valley is fairly insular, even though we happen to be in a rather large market, and most of those who write either know personally, or have had some kind of interaction with, others who write.

Josh — I presume to use his first name even though we never actually met — was someone whose politics and personal affinities were diametrically opposed to my own.

We mixed it up sometimes on social media, usually with me criticizing something he’d written because I couldn’t believe he’d actually written it.

The most recent encounter involved Wawa: Josh had written an opinion piece attacking the convenience chain for “abandoning” Philadelphia, as if they had some obligation to continue subjecting their employees to shoplifters, drug addicts, aggression and homeless people.

Josh would have called them “unhoused people.”

He also would have rejected the term “drug addict,” possibly shaming me into submission by mentioning that he himself had once suffered from substance abuse.

In other words, we had no common words.

On Monday morning, when I heard that he had been shot to death in a home invasion, I could no longer feign ignorance. This was tragic, unbelievable, real life. I initially hesitated to say anything, because of my past criticisms. It didn’t seem appropriate.

But then I started seeing things in social media that made me sick to my stomach, and I realized that sometimes, silence is assent.

If I remained silent and didn’t point out what was happening among some of the people with whom I do share politics and personal affinities, I would be guilty of the same things they were doing.

And for all that I was not a friend to Josh in life, I owe him this in death.

Josh Kruger was a huge booster for the city of Philadelphia, as I am, but he was almost willfully blind to the gun crisis unfolding.

One of his very last public posts was a retweet of a tweet by former Dilbert illustrator Scott Adams who suggested to Josh that if Joe Biden were elected in 2020, he would be killed.

He called Adams, tongue in cheek, “Nostradamus.”

That night, he was shot to death.

Not one to let a tragedy go to waste, and in repellent bad taste, Adams actually posted this when he heard about the murder:

“Oops. Did not realize he was shot to death yesterday for not getting away from the hellhole in which he lived.”

This was tame, compared to some of the other things I saw posted on Josh’s timeline.

It’s amazing the cockroaches that crawl out of the woodwork when there is no possibility that you will get pushback.

The cowardice and the lack of taste are not unexpected. But they really are soul crushing when you realize that some of these people normally “like” your stuff and write emails to tell you what a great writer you are.

There is a line over which we do not step when someone dies in a tragic manner.

We do not blame them for their own death at the hands of a criminal, even if that victim supported policies that made his death more likely.

But here’s the thing. The little that we now know about the murder suggests that it was not a random shooting, another home invasion involving robbery or unrelated criminal acts.

It seems likely that the victim knew his murderer, and that it might have had something to do with a domestic matter.

In fact, in the days before his death, Josh had posted about vandalism at his home, and receiving strange mail.

This would not appear to be the kind of violence that he and I disagreed about, the nameless, nihilistic thuggery that occurs every day in the streets of Philadelphia and beyond.

That’s even more reason for the people on the right to just shut up with their snark and their schadenfreude.

And it is mostly people on the right, who somehow saw this death as an opportunity to make political points.

This includes national figures like Mike Cernovick, a right wing pundit who had the gall to say that people who were mocking his lisp had somehow, mysteriously died, as if this justified Josh Kruger’s shooting death because he had discredited the rising tide of gun deaths.

Death requires, if not sympathy, at the very least, sobriety.

As our grandmothers said, if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

Word to my tribe: You lose members when you show your inhumanity.

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Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

John F. Kennedy’s book “Profiles in Courage” told the story of a rare, few U.S. senators who went against the tide of popular opinion and committed acts that ultimately led to severe criticism and in some cases, political defeat.

The names are at best vaguely remembered and in some cases lost to history, but the idea of defying societal standards in service of a higher purpose i.e. “doing the right thing” as Spike Lee might say, is fundamental.

I thought of the book this week when Judge Wendy L. Pew dismissed all charges against Philadelphia Police Officer Mark Dial.

Dial had been charged with murder and other lesser offenses by Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, a man who has weaponized his office against the police department as a means of advancing his “social justice” philosophy.

Krasner’s focus is on dismantling the supposedly racist criminal justice system, emptying jails, and providing “restorative justice” to those who have been harmed by the bigotry of people who think felons belong in prison. It’s a philosophy common among a new breed of prosecutors who are really just lesser-paid criminal defense attorneys in disguise.

This past Tuesday, Pew dismissed the charges against Dial because she found they had no evidentiary basis. People, with no legal training but with a lot of social media savvy, have argued that the judge overlooked video evidence, eyewitness testimony and departed from accepted standards when dismissing the charges, which were immediately lodged again by Krasner.

In the Twittersphere, activists started aiming for the judge, leveling thinly veiled threats about taking her seat from her in the upcoming election. And there were some more ominous threats as well.

On the evening of the dismissal, riots erupted in the streets of Philadelphia. I was caught up in one of them near 15th and Chestnut streets in Center City, where a group of unhinged vandals and what I like to call “Flat Screen And Sneaker Activists” plundered local stores, carrying their booty in their arms like refugees fleeing some sort of civil war.

Only they were the ones causing the mayhem and the conflict.

Judge Pew isn’t as fortunate. She works in a courtroom, protected by layers of security, but her name has been out there and unwisely cited by a number of local publications that, while entitled to distribute the news, could have done so in a more measured way.

Then we had local journalists whom I will not name but with whom I used to work tweeting out videos about how horrific it was that Dial was allowed to walk, and writing that they were “beyond outrage.”

I understand being “beyond outrage.” I was beyond outrage when I was forced to navigate through a mob of vandals, and a phalanx of police officers to get to my home on Tuesday night.

I was beyond outraged that the legitimate dismissal of charges triggered a night of riots and looting.

I was beyond outraged that the actions of a judge, after due deliberation and with a deep understanding of the rights of defendants, have been attacked as just another example of racism.

Ironically, the day that the charges were dismissed against Dial, I was watching a docuseries from my friend Tigre Hill on Paramount+ called “72 Seconds in Rittenhouse,” which recounts the murder of Sean Schellenger at the hands of Michael White.

When Schellenger, a real estate agent was stabbed in the back by White, a food service deliveryman, the case became a Rohrshack test on race, class and due process.

I am quoted in the series praising Frank Rizzo, whose idea of policing is now considered antiquated in this “kinder to the criminal, gentler on the crime” era.

While many people would disagree with my assessment of the former police commissioner/mayor, I think that the sharp swing to the other extreme represented by Larry Krasner and the progressive prosecutors is profoundly damaging to society.

That is why what Pew did is both remarkable and courageous.

She clearly understood the tenor of the city, and the desire for a pound of flesh from a police officer.

It’s no secret that Krasner has been waging war on police for the past six years, ever since he was first elected to office. She also clearly understood where many progressive Philadelphians stand on criminal justice reform.

And yet she honored our shared profession by not allowing emotions or security concerns to blind her to the reality: Krasner had overcharged Dial, and his evidence didn’t add up.

She had two choices: ignore that and go forward with the case or terminate the legal farce.

Her actions were a profile in courage, and since she is barred from speaking out about her actions, I will do it for her: well done, your honor.

Thank you for refusing to be intimidated by social narratives, and for following the law.

–

Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

When my father proudly mentioned to one of his colleagues that his firstborn child had just been accepted to Bryn Mawr College, he responded: “Let’s hope she doesn’t stop shaving her underarms.”

This quip was relayed to me years later by that same gentleman, with a half apology.

While there was some truth to the suggestion that Bryn Mawrters were not exactly glittery Disney princesses, I didn’t notice an unusual amount of hirsute women flooding the campus. We seemed to run the normal range, from exceptionally fashionable to exceptionally nerdy, with most of us falling somewhere in between.

Taking into consideration we were a single-sex college, we represented a fairly accurate cross-section of society. Black, white and brown. African, Asian and American. Immigrant and native-born. Smart and much, much smarter. Straight and gay. Probably a lot more of the latter.

I say all of this to provide some sort of context for my disgust at my alma mater’s new, unnecessary and divisive push for “inclusion.” It was recently announced that Bryn Mawr, a school that regularly charges over $60,000 in tuition, is inaugurating a program for the upcoming 2023-24 academic year to address the phantom problems of bigotry on campus.

On the school’s website, they set out a 59-point action plan designed to overhaul every aspect of college life, including courses, campus life and financial aid. The thing that most angers me about this initiative, called “Advancing Equity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism” is its flagrant hypocrisy.

If you are charging someone many thousands of dollars to attend your hallowed institution, it really isn’t nice to accuse them of being bigots before even stepping foot on campus.

This presumption that we need to send the little darlings to re-education camps in the leafy climes of suburban Philadelphia is anathema to the whole principle of higher education.

And then we have the actual programs.

If you read the description on the college’s website, you will find the words “inclusion,” “equity,” “anti-racism,” “ignorance,” “bias” and “social justice” included dozens of times.

You cannot find a sentence that does not have one of these catchwords and phrases, that mean absolutely nothing but trigger a sense that this place is a hotbed of “exclusion,” “inequity,” “racism,” and “social injustice.”

The need to castigate people for sins they have not yet committed, and require a daily regimen of self-flagellation is not what parents want their daughters to have to deal with while they are shelling out thousands of dollars in tuition.

I am livid that the school from which I obtained my degree is instituting this overhaul in response to the sense that some people are victims — in their own minds — and those who do not agree are the victimizers.

I cannot believe that a school that dedicated itself to educating young women to be self-sufficient and to stand tall and alone in the world is now coaxing them into one of two postures: guilt for crimes they have not committed against victims they never met or in the alternative, hostility against people who never harmed them.

That is what DEI programs create and foment, this sense that history is an albatross and that we will always be rooted in the racism and hatred of our ancestors.

To treat students to an entire year, and likely multiple years of crash courses in how our identity is the only thing that really matters is to undermine the excellence that was the hallmark of Bryn Mawr College for generations.

I say “was” because, sadly, the school has dipped somewhat in the rankings from when I studied there back in 1979-1983.

I say these things with no happiness. I long ago cut the umbilical cord with my once-beloved alma mater, horrified at the turn that it had taken into a land where the way you say something is more important than what is being said, where pronouns were fungible things, where the color of your skin did in fact determine the content of your character and where they actually invited Angela Davis as an “honored speaker.”

It is like watching your own mother die of a slow and debilitating form of cancer.

When I was hoisting my lantern in the cloisters in 1983, I used to think that I’d be back when my own daughter was enrolled at Bryn Mawr.

I never had children, but even if I did, I wouldn’t have sent them to a school where they were regularly shamed and told that they needed to overcome their privilege and power, right after I had forked over $60,000 to the guys lecturing them.

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Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

I come from a long line of anti-fascists.

My cousin Adolph Pace was a member of the 101st Airborne Division that parachuted onto the Normandy beaches on D-Day.

His parachute was later used to make the wedding dress of my cousin Helen. The blood and dirt stains of battle were covered up with love and care by her mother Jennie’s crocheted lace hearts and flowers.

Before my father went down South to fight for the civil rights of what were then called “negro voters,” he spent almost two years in the frigid climate of Thule, Greenland, where he worked at a NORAD post during the Cold War.

Although the enemy was officially “communism,” he considered it a battle against the forces of oppression and the labels didn’t matter.

He felt the same way about the racists in Mississippi who, while they did not overtly adopt Hitler or Stalin as their role models, engaged in the same tactics of hatred and intimidation.

In my immigration practice, I have had contact with many courageous individuals who have fought against fascism, including clients who openly opposed dictators, the Taliban, and repressive Central American gangs.

I know what fascism looks like, smells like, sounds like.

I also know the people who call themselves anti-fascists or “antifa” in this country are frauds. I say that from personal experience.

Today, if you are looking for fascism, you will find it.

That does not mean that it actually exists, only that you are capable of turning innocent straw into racist gold, like a social justice Rumpelstiltskin.

I’ve written about many of these instances where, for example, a random comment has been turned into a federal case, resulting in the loss of jobs and reputation.

Nikki Haley dealt with that a month ago when she was accused of being a bigot for suggesting that it’s not a good thing to vote for Biden because that means we will end up getting Kamala Harris.

A factual statement becomes an indictment of women of color. Fascism!

And then we have the strange idea that calling a man a man and a woman a woman is bigotry and oppression, and that using the wrong pronouns will lead someone to commit suicide.

It’s a twisted version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” wherein we are forced to pretend that gender is not only fluid, it’s not even “real.”

We also cannot overlook the crusade to defund the police, which has been a pet project of the Antifa left (because there is no Antifa right) since well before one rogue police officer killed George Floyd.

The irony is that the very people who want us to strip money and resources from law enforcement end up being the ones who scream the loudest when they themselves are victims of crime.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the Democratic party official in Minnesota who had vowed to defund the police in 2020 and was recently a victim of a violent carjacking.

They say that a conservative is a liberal who was just mugged. Perhaps we should change that to “a liberal who was just carjacked” since Shivanthi Sathanandan is now whining for tougher penalties for criminals.

And my favorite is when they tell us that books that are readily available in libraries and on Amazon have somehow been “banned.”

There is this sense that unless children can have access to graphic novels about how Johnny became Janie and then engaged in sodomy during school recess, we are being Orwellian censors, destroying the creativity of our youth.

These are all First World problems.

Fascism exists today, only not in this country. At the very least, it is not ingrained in our legal system, in our government agencies, and in our religious organizations.

Those things happen in other countries, the ones that people are fleeing to seek shelter in the United States.

You can argue that there are hate groups, and you can throw around the term “white nationalism,” but these are aberrations, and do not occupy positions of authority in our institutions.

I understand there are politicians who say things we don’t like, and sue Disney, and pass laws that try and stop women from having abortions and do things that generally make liberals and squishy moderates angry, but these are all a part of the political process.

These are not the actions of fascist dictators, and the self-styled Antifa of today are simply children, looking for relevance in a world that is on to their game.

Now let me go look for my parachute.

–

Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

The last time that I wrote anything about the Proud Boys, I got into some hot water.

There was a young man from the Bon Air Fire Department in Delaware County who had attended one or two Proud Boys meetings, and decided that it wasn’t for him. However, the mere fact that he had dared attend a meeting was considered sufficient grounds to treat him as a Nazi, which is what many people called him.

When the YouTube video of me defending this young man’s First Amendment rights was made public, several Antifa sympathizers started trolling me on social media, and I responded in kind. That was a big no-no for a news organization that thought I needed to be “nice” to people who hated me, and eventually they decided I was too much of a liability to keep.

Score two (the firefighter and the columnist) for Orwell.

I haven’t paid much attention to the Proud Boys since that incident. Nothing in their platform seems remotely legitimate, and their involvement in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol make them repellent, repulsive and stupid. And, they have too many tattoos.

That being said, their members also happen to be U.S. citizens entitled to all of the protections of the laws including the First Amendment.

They deserved to be convicted, and sentenced, commensurate with the gravity of their crimes.

But in order for us to have some sense of confidence in our legal system, we need to believe that the laws are applied fairly, and consistently.

We need, for example, to believe that someone who is rioting in the streets of Philadelphia, smashing store windows and stealing flat-screen TVs under the guise of social justice, is going to be charged with a crime.

We are not asking that they receive 17-year prison sentences. We are not asking that they be kept in solitary confinement. We are not calling them traitors to the state.

We just want them to, at the very least, have a criminal record that can later be expunged if they stop acting like vandals.

We also want the Justice Department to stop targeting pro-life fathers who protest outside of Planned Parenthood clinics, get into tussles with obnoxious old men who lie about being injured, and have the audacity to preach about the sanctity of unborn human life.

We would have no problem whatsoever if one particular pro-life father was charged with simple assault, assuming that the victim of the assault really did suffer some injury.

We would be fine with this father being ticketed and forced to stay beyond a 25-foot radius of the clinic.

What we have a big problem with is when federal agents, in a SWAT team maneuver, wage a pre-dawn raid upon his home, in front of his terrified wife and young children, and charge him with felonies under a statute, which was essentially designed to protect clinics from annoying (but legal) protesters.

Although the FACE — Freedom of Access to Clinics — Act was purportedly enacted to address the wave of violence against clinics, it has been used as a way for pro-abortion advocates to silence dissent, including the peaceful dissent of rosary-carrying grandmothers.

That’s because if you think there is even the slimmest possibility that you will be charged with felonious trespass, you might just stay home. End of protest.

You might be saying to yourself, what does any of this have to do with the Proud Boys and their involvement in Jan. 6?

And the answer is simple: the laws should be applied to everyone on an equal basis, without fear or favor depending upon your race, class, gender or political persuasion.

If the women who defaced churches after the Dobbs decision, beheading statues and writing obscenities on walls were hunted down and prosecuted the way that the Jan. 6 protestors have been, I would have no issue with the execution of American justice.

If, again, the vandals who set our cities on fire after George Floyd was killed had been charged with actual crimes, instead of receiving apologies and payments for the “violation of their civil rights,” I’d be celebrating the glory of the legal system.

If women who lied about being raped were actually prosecuted for filing false reports at the same rate that men are being falsely accused of being rapists, I’d throw away all of my books about the horrific Kavanaugh hearings, and write a column praising Gloria Allred.

But that is not the case.

The Proud Boys have no reason to be proud. They are repugnant. But so are the George Floyd protestors who, in their own way, tried to destroy the foundations of our society with their hatred. Or in other words, your terrorists are no better than mine.

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Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

Sometimes when I write about my father’s civil rights work in Mississippi, I get emails telling me that I should be proud of his fight against racism at a time when it was neither easy nor accepted, particularly in a young white man.

Other times I get comments about how bizarre it is that such a wonderful father sired such a backward daughter, someone who voted for the wrong president and holds bigoted beliefs.

But the comments that anger me the most are the ones that demean and diminish the efforts of people like my father. There is now a movement to label the civil rights work of people in the majority, usually white men but also women who are considered “privileged,” of being a part of the toxic “white savior syndrome.”

I had occasion to revisit that anger this past month when I heard about the controversy pitting Michael Oher, the former Baltimore Ravens football player, against the white family who took him in after he was abandoned and neglected by his drug-addicted biological mother.

I don’t need to rehash the story here, because most of us have seen the movie “The Blind Side” where a Tennessee family “adopts” a homeless Black teen, gives him a place to stay, mentors him through school and helps him get into an elite football program.

This was a fairytale, and while we all knew to take it with a grain of Hollywood salt the size of Mount Rushmore, the basic story was incredibly inspiring. Until, that is, Michael Oher decided to shatter what he now calls a lie.

He is accusing that family, the Touheys, of never actually adopting him but of instead putting him under a legal conservatorship. He recently filed a lawsuit charging them with exploitation, alleging that they only wanted to control his money, and that he had no idea he wasn’t ever adopted.

Unfortunately for Oher, he wrote a memoir about a decade ago where he actually admits that he knew about the conservatorship, so in terms of lies he is already one up on the Touheys. Additionally, there is ample evidence in the record that Oher received the exact same share of proceeds from the movie as the Touheys’ biological children, who always considered him a brother.

What should have been just another sad example of money corrupting family ties was taken to a new and disturbing level when people started bringing race into the mix. Articles began showing up with titles like Vox’s “Was ‘The Blind Side’s’ White Savior Narrative Built on a Lie?” and NPR’s ‘The Blind Side’s’ Drama Just Proves the Cheap, Meaningless Hope of White Savior Films”

When “To Kill A Mockingbird” was being prepared for its Broadway staging a few seasons ago, producer Aaron Sorkin was quoted as saying he wanted to minimize the “white savior” aspects of Harper Lee’s original narrative.

At the time he observed that “I realized something about my favorite scene in the movie and in the book … at the end of the trial, Atticus is putting his stuff back in his briefcase. The courtroom has cleared out except for the people in what they call ‘the colored section.’ Everyone has stood up silently. Rev. Sykes says to Scout: Miss Jean Louise, stand up, your father’s passin’. That really is a white savior moment. And it’s a liberal fantasy that marginalized people will recognize me, that I’m one of the good ones.”

That iconic scene is probably my favorite, not just in that movie but in any movie. I admit that I think of my own father when I look at Gregory Peck’s stoic figure, saddened but not entirely defeated, because I imagine Daddy felt the same way when he lost his own cases down in Mississippi in 1967.

To now have someone take what was a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit, which has no color, creed or gender, and completely twist
it around angers me.

Yes, I am a white woman and I can’t exactly empathize with a homeless Black teen who was essentially abandoned by his drug-addicted birth mother.

But I am someone who doesn’t think that the color of the person who is throwing me a lifeline matters all that much.

Do you think that the parents who were desperate to save their children’s lives cared that renowned pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson was not a white man? I don’t.

So while I’m sure Michael Oher feels he was wronged, race has nothing to do with it. Only race baiters would see it that way.

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Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

I hate to be cliché, but I’m going to tell you a proverb you’ve probably already heard a hundred or so times.

There was a frog, and he saw this pot of boiling water and said to himself, “I’m not going there. I’m not crazy.”

A few days later, he saw another pot of water, and it looked rather lukewarm. Since the frog wanted to take a quick dip, and he was far from his lily pad, he jumped in and started doing the backstroke.

It felt good and he thought, “this isn’t so bad after all.” As he was splashing around, he didn’t notice the water was getting warmer and warmer, until bubbles started popping around him. He was slowly becoming used to the heat, and ended up on somebody’s plate with a stalk of asparagus on his belly.

The moral of the story is that what seems shocking at the beginning becomes less and less shocking the longer we are exposed to it.

I felt a bit like that frog the other day, watching the news out of Georgia. The immediate past president was just charged with election interference by a grand jury.

The district attorney stood at the podium and, looking like a deer in headlights, announced that 19 ham sandwiches had been indicted. One of them was Donald Trump.

The first time the once-and-he-hopes-future-president was charged with paying hush money to a porn star by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, I was horrified. Then it happened again, when a federal grand jury issued a 37-count indictment against that same ex-president of hoarding, and concealing, classified documents.

By this point, I was disturbed but not as shocked and offended as I’d been a couple of months before.

The water was getting warmer, so to speak.

But it was only June.

Then, at the beginning of this month, a federal grand jury in Washington indicted the former president on charges of election interference in connection with the Jan. 6 riots.

Special Counsel Jack Smith comes out and makes a compelling statement about how Trump incited mayhem, forgetting to mention the part where the former president had asked his followers to “protest peacefully.”

The water, by this point, was scalding.

I didn’t see the bubbles, but that might have been because I was looking at Mika Brezinski’s face and trying to figure out how many more surgeries it would take before she ended up looking like a hammerhead shark.

Finally, last week, the world stopped and waited, and waited, and waited, until a grand jury in Georgia issued its own indictments on election interference.

And there I was, with third-degree burns and not even caring because I was used to the heat.

I can say that the Alvin Bragg and classified document cases are by far the weakest, because if we prosecuted every man who ever had a fling with a happy time girl and then tried to hide it to keep Mother from finding out, we would run out of court stenographers.

As for the classified documents, until I see Mike Pence and Joe Biden in horizontal stripes, I’m not worrying about the likelihood of any conviction on that front.

What I am interested in is the way that Americans seem inured to the very real dangers of piling on prosecutions of men who may have been unethical, amoral and annoying, but whose conduct does not justify the onslaught of what now looks like political prosecutions.

It is possible that the ex-president engaged in actual election interference, although you have to prove intent. To me, the guy seems like he actually believed he’d won the election.

He is likely wrong, dead wrong.

But that subjective belief is not out of line when you consider that many other Americans agree with him.

They are not all Stepford voters.

I do not agree with the folks who are saying that this is the end of democracy and that our country is sinking into the same despotism that gave rise to Putin, Mao and Manuel Trujillo — look him up, he was a better-dressed Castro.

What I am saying is that it’s very dangerous when people start treating multiple, serial indictments of a former president as just another headline, or the story of the moment on cable.

This is serious stuff, something that has never before happened in this country, and as Arthur Miller wrote in “Death of a Salesman,” attention must be paid.

And unless these prosecutors really do have the evidence, and aren’t trying to engage in their own form of election interference, we, my nonamphibious friends, are cooked.

–

Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

Over the weekend, I was looking for free movies to watch. Fortunately, some of the best films — black and white classics — show up on the budget channels.

One of my favorite B movies, the original “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” was available on demand. So I popped the popcorn, made some tea and settled in.

When I first saw this movie I must have been about 10. It scared the beejeezus out of me, and triggered a lifelong fear of whatever was growing under my bed. To this day, I jump onto the mattress out of an irrational but robust fear that either a pod person or Barnabas Collins is living there.

Of course you remember the plot.

Kevin McCarthy — the actor, not the House Majority leader — is a doctor who sees his friends turning into empty shells, perfectly modeled after actual human beings but stripped of their souls and their personalities. They look normal, they mimic the voices and mannerisms of their hosts, but they are zombie-like entities with neither emotion nor compassion.

When the host falls asleep, the creature swallows it whole, obliterating it’s identity and unique humanity. It’s the bio-monster version of first-degree murder.

One particularly chilling scene depicts the creation of the pods, blooming from foam and becoming human facsimiles before our eyes. It is a silent, stealthy consumption of identity.

As I got older and read the historical context of the film, I realized that it was in some ways a commentary on the paranoia of the Cold War, the idea that evil lurked in our backyards and we needed to remain vigilant to communist influence. We needed to stay awake.

In an interview given before his death, Kevin McCarthy offered an alternate interpretation of the movie.

He said that he believed it was a commentary on the corporate takeover of society, where individuals became subservient to the collective. No dissent, no crooked edges, no difference. Just one well-oiled societal machine with no room for second opinions. If you disagree, you will be hunted down, and destroyed.

This movie terrified me as a child. Today it seems prophetic.

We have come to a point where people who speak out against the obvious madness that is being forced down throats and into school curriculum are shunned.

For example, if you speak the heresy of gender, insisting that there are only two of them, you are canceled.

You might have written the most beloved series of children’s books in a century, but you will be excised, like a cancerous tumor, from your own literary library.

You might be the greatest female tennis player of your generation, a proud defender of gay rights, but you will be ridiculed for failing to accept men in women’s sports.

You might have triumphed in your field, a surgeon who operated on the vulnerable bodies of sick infants, a Black man who served in the wrong president’s administration, and they will describe you with racist tropes.

There is a way to escape the cancellation. You simply accept what they tell you, and make public penance.

You agree that you’re a racist, or a transphobe, or a Trump supporter, or pro abortion, you mock religion, you attack mothers who challenge school boards, you go on the cable stations like a former New Jersey governor and grovel for crumbs of affection from the sneering anchors, the ones who ridicule you behind your back.

If you do this, the collective will consider forgiving your heresy. But they will demand small concessions, like pronouns in your email.

When Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville questioned the existence of white supremacy, a fluid term that is a useful weapon in the hands of progressives, he was, predictably, called a white supremacist in the cybersphere. To deny is to confess, in this environment.

But there are bright spots.

When Jason Aldean wrote a song about hitting back against thugs who hurt elderly women, he was called a racist. Ironically, his song became No. 1.

When Bud Light mocked women by handing a can to a person with a penis who just happened to wear makeup, they lost millions in revenue.

Some of us are watching, and haven’t yet fallen into pod slumber.

At the end of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” Kevin McCarthy loses his love interest to sleep, and then a reawakening as a soulless member of the collective.

Some of us have also lost friends and family to the madness, cut off because they cannot deal with our dissenting views. They fell asleep, and when they woke up and saw that we were still defiantly human, they felt betrayed.

The movie ends on a note of cautious hope, amidst the maelstrom of paranoia.

One man insists on fighting back. We should pay attention.

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Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

Conservatives are often hesitant to criticize other conservatives.

Florida issued its guidelines for teaching history last month, including a set of standards that covered the issue of slavery in grades 6 through 8.

It’s likely that what happened next would have been a big yawn for most folks, until Kamala Harris pointed it out in one of the few speeches she’s ever given in coherent English.

The vice president referenced a section of the new guidelines which read as follows:

“Examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g. agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).”

So far, so good.

But then the standards make the unnecessary leap to this controversial point:

“Instruction [will] include how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Kamala being Kamala, she managed to turn this into an opportunity to rant about racism, saying to a receptive crowd that “Just yesterday, in the state of Florida, they decided middle school students will be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery. They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, and we will not stand for it. We who share a collective experience in knowing we must honor history and our duty in the context of legacy.”

I rarely agree with the vice president on anything. Her voice scares me. Her past treatment of Brett Kavanaugh, lie after lie from the Senate floor, repels me and makes her a figure of immense disdain.

She was picked as Joe Biden’s running mate because she checked off the right boxes, including the one that says “make friends with the candidate who called you a racist, you know, that little girl, senator, on the bus, that was her.”

But she has a point. It really never ends well when you try and find a positive spin about slavery.

After Kamala made her statements about Florida trying to point out how some slaves actually “benefited” from slavery, a number of progressives picked up the chant and it became a thing on social media.

The problem is, it should have been a thing. It should have been brought to the attention of the public, moaned about by the grifter hosts on MSNBC for a few days, and then put to rest with a clear acknowledgement from us — from conservatives — that this was a mistake, and that the sentence needed to be removed from the curriculum.

Instead what happened was the typical circling of the wagons, with some ridiculous narrative twisting from people like Twitter darling Allie Beth Stuckey, a podcast host who continued to argue that slavery taught slaves resilience.

This is an actual tweet from this prolific pundit:

“What’s more offensive? Saying some slaves benefitted from skills they learned while enslaved, or using slavery to cover for your anti-DeSantis grift?”

I replied:

“I’m pretty sure, blondie, it’s saying slavery had an upside. My God, I never realized the conservative movement had such mediocre shills.”

Imagine, for a course on the Holocaust, that you suggest that skills Jews and other prisoners of the Nazi regime developed might have benefited them if they were eventually liberated.

Imagine saying that Anne Frank honed some amazing journaling skills while in hiding from the SS. Imagine suggesting that the experiences Primo Levi and Eli Weisel lived through in their respective captivity taught them resilience, and that what they learned became the basis of some of the greatestliterature of all time.

Imagine doing that.

On second thought, imagine screaming back that this is madness, cruel and utterly repulsive.

That’s what I would do. That’s what we should all do.

When my father went to Mississippi in 1967, he met some men and women who maintained an amazing sense of dignity even under the oppression of Jim Crow.

It never occurred to him to think that Jim Crow benefited them in some ways by helping them become “resilient.”

I’m very sad that some conservatives doubled down when they were told how wrong they were. I’m angry that they tried to gaslight us into believing we were the crazy folk.

And I am again reminded that if you tolerate mediocrity from your friends, you cannot then criticize it in your enemies.

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Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

After my column about not being able to find a theater that screened “Sound of Freedom” appeared last week, I was on the receiving end of a lot of generous offers of rides, tickets and they even set up a GoFund me to pay for my taxi fare.

I did finally bite the bullet and take an Uber out to the AMC Marple 10 this past Sunday, which was the closest place I could find in suburban Philadelphia that didn’t involve dodging bullets during the previews.

I was very happy to see that the theater was about three-quarters full, and many of the people looked like couples out on a date, very different from the older crowd that attended “Oppenheimer,” which I’d seen the day before.

That should give you an idea of how “Sound of Freedom” is the little movie that could, making its way into our consciousness despite the mean-spirited and grossly inaccurate attacks from critics.

As someone who has dealt with the back end of trafficking, namely the people who make it to the United States and are able to somehow find a lawyer to help them seek asylum and protection, I can confirm that many of the scenes depicted in “Sound of Freedom” echo what people have told me in the past about how they made their way to the U.S.

So many of these people, both old clients and acquaintances, have talked about the subterfuge used to lure people into the sex trades, the random violence and brutality of the human traffickers, and the absolute desperation of the victims.

This movie provides a necessary public service, in bringing this incredibly important issue to the eyes and ears of people who are otherwise ignorant.

When we talk about immigration, including what many on the right like to call an “invasion” and others refer to simply as the flow of “illegals,” the focus is on the motivation of the human cargo.

Many of those who don’t work in this field write off the desperation of a mother with no means of support for her children, or a father who is afraid his son will be recruited by gang members, as not “our problem.”

When people are in the asylum system, they have already been victims of violence and are seeking to have the broken pieces glued back again. I can help with the gluing together, but I cannot stop the breaking.

My anger arose from the lies that I have heard told about this film by so many in the mainstream media, and a large number on the left.

I initially gave some of them the benefit of the doubt, thinking that perhaps the film took aim at Democrats, or sacred liberal cows like marginalized groups.

I had some thought that the idea of sex trafficking became linked to the LGBTQ community and therefore the critics were angry because they thought it smeared, by association, vulnerable constituencies.

I was wrong. The only thing that I could see that would trigger the left was the underlying theme of faith, of the importance of God, a God that was not owned by Christians, Jews or Muslims.

The only reason I could find, other than a bitterness toward leading man Jim Caviezel was a hostility toward any film that had as its tagline: “God’s children are not for sale.”

I looked for technical inaccuracies. I looked for outright lies about our government and its inaction. I looked for some hook that would justify the rejection of this film by the intellectuals on the left, and all I came up with was that tagline and its significance.

If that is the only reason a film this powerful and this important is being marginalized by the kind of person who thinks Barbie is a feminist prophet, we’re in more trouble as a society than I ever thought.

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Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].