Lynch Mob Lawyer
The bigger the riots, the bigger the payout.
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Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
$27 million in the George Floyd case, $12 million in the Breonna Taylor case, and $1.5 million in the Michael Brown case. Ben Crump’s business is smearing cops and intimidating cities into offering huge settlements in the hopes of avoiding even more expensive BLM race riots.
Crump, dubbed a “civil rights lawyer” by the media, and the nation’s “black attorney general” by race hoax thug Al Sharpton, is delivering for his clients and, almost certainly, for himself. As Reuters noted, “Crump’s payments have not been made public but plaintiffs’ attorneys frequently receive around a third of the settlement amount.”
Neighborhoods burn, store owners lose their livelihoods, and people die, but Ben gets richer.
You can usually spot Ben Crump at press conferences, raising a fist next to Sharpton, or the family of whichever robber or drug dealer was the latest to die while struggling with a cop.
A list of Crump’s clients also often happens to be a map of race riots, hateful protests, and a nation divided by racist incitement. From Trayvon Martin to Michael Brown to George Floyd to Daunte Wright, Crump is on the ground, raising a fist, and vowing to fight until the check clears.
“This historic $27 million settlement is PROOF that Black lives will no longer be written off as trivial, unimportant, or unworthy of consequences,” Crump declared in March after the Floyd payout. Despite all those millions, Crump is still showing up to sue anyone he can..
Crump's best weapon is histrionics. His book is titled, "Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People". He demanded first-degree murder charges against Derek Chauvin, the officer who was restraining Floyd when the career criminal died of what medical experts determined was a heart attack caused by a drug overdose. “Driving while Black continues to result in a death sentence,” Crump falsely claimed over the death of Daunte Wright who in addition to driving had a warrant out for his arrest for choking a woman and robbing her at gunpoint.
Crump is not shy about admitting that he's not really making legal arguments, he's feeding lynch mobs with lies.
"What we're doing is continuing to make the arguments in the court of public opinion," Crump claimed. "The court of law is not very kind to marginalized minorities."
What Crump actually does is make dangerous claims that aren’t true, that don’t stand up in court, but that help incite the mobs already eager to riot in the name of false smears of racism.
After Makiyah Bryant was shot by a police officer before she could stab another girl with a knife, Crump tweeted that the police had, “killed an unarmed 15yo Black girl.”
Bryant was 16 and she was attacking two girls with a knife.
An op-ed in the Courier Journal alleged that, “Crump helped create the untrue ‘hands up, don’t shoot!’ mantra”. Six black eyewitnesses told a grand jury that Brown was charging the officer head down when he was fatally shot. But Crump’s lawsuit claimed that Brown had his hands up. In his book, Crump wrote that, “Brown stopped running, turned around with his hands up, and started slowly walking toward the police officer.”
Ben Crump even includes him in the list of black men “wrongfully” killed “who posed no threat”.
Crump falsely claimed that George Floyd and Officer Derek Chauvin, who restrained him, knew each other, and that because of that Chauvin should be charged with first-degree murder.
What kind of lawyer does that? The kind who doesn’t have the facts on his side.
Crump has a history of making claims that aren’t true.
"I don't want to sugarcoat it," Crump falsely claimed of Michael Brown. "He was executed in broad daylight." The truth is that Brown committed a strong-arm robbery, tried to take a police officer’s gun and punched him.
Crump claimed that Jacob Blake was "shot several times in the back" by the police "after breaking up a fight." Actually the police were responding to a domestic abuse call by Blake’s fiance who previously accused him of sexual assault. Blake got into a car, and appeared to be about to kidnap a child. Officers tried to use a taser on him, but Blake tore away the taser wires.
Blake pulled a knife on them and only then was he shot.
But no matter what, Crump sticks to his basic narrative which is that black people get shot by police and white people don’t. This big lie is so central to his story that Crump even titled one of his chapters in the book, "Police Don't Shoot White Men in the Back". "A Black person moves a certain way, they’ll shoot to kill them," Crump ranted to Vanity Fair, while "[a white person] can literally attack, spit on them, take their car, and drive towards them, and they still don’t shoot."
“[Police] know how to de-escalate just fine. Look at how they de-escalated with the white nationalists who were attacking the Capitol on January 6, 2021,” Crump argued.
Crump neglects to mention the fact that a black Capitol Police officer, whose name, unlike the names of those officers who have killed Black Lives Matter martyrs, shot and killed Ashli Babbitt, who was unarmed, making her the only person killed during the Capitol Riot.
Unlike the various criminals he rallies behind, the “civil rights lawyer” has not rushed out to meet with her family, hold press conferences, and demand justice for a white woman killed by police.
Nor has he shown any interest in the fatal shooting of Justine Damond, a white woman, by a black Somali police officer in Minneapolis, except to use her case as evidence of racism.
“Only one man in history has been held accountable, and that was a minority man that killed a white woman, Justine Damond,” Crump claimed at a press conference with the families of George Floyd and Daunte Wright, both of whom, unlike Damond, were criminals.
The rest of the time Crump ignores the existence of white people killed by police.
“I would ask the audience to name me one white man who was killed by excessive use of force or shot in the back? I tell after a minute of silence, that they’re not to worry, I will wait for them to give me a name,” Crump writes in "Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People".
Police actually shoot more unarmed white people than black people. And the number of unarmed people of all races shot by police remains negligible.
Crump doesn’t just argue that police are more likely to kill black people, he contends that, “only black people seem to have to worry about the police shooting first and asking questions later.”
But Crump isn’t making a legal argument. His argument in the “court of public opinion” is that America is racist and that the police are agents of genocide.
It’s a big lie guaranteed to feed racism, incite lynch mobs and divide Americans.
“Police killings are brutalizing black and brown people and do in fact amount to genocide,” Crump insists.
There is no evidence that Floyd’s death or any of the other deaths in or around the police have been motivated by racism. Even Attorney General Keith Ellison had admitted to 60 Minutes that there was no evidence that “Derek Chauvin had a specific racial intent to harm George Floyd”.
But Crump’s argument is that the police, all the police, black and white, are racially biased against blacks. In his book, he quotes a study showing that, “nonwhite officers kill both black and Latino suspects at significantly higher rates than white officers do” and blames institutional racism. When black officers shoot black criminals, it’s because America is systemically racist.
Even though institutional racism of any kind has been outlawed since the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
“America is telling us they’re not gonna give us anything. If we’re gonna get equality, we have to take it,” Crump threatened.
He justified his regular rallies and press conferences, which are indistinguishable from incitement to a lynch mob, outside the George Floyd trial with the mantra, “We have to keep the pressure on.” Pressuring a court case already in progress is what lynch mobs do.
"This is the Ben Crump model. He goes into a city, creates a racist narrative, cherry-picks facts to establish, to prove that narrative, creates chaos in a community, misrepresents the facts, and then, he leaves with his money and then asks the community to pick up the pieces," Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who is black, observed.
It’s the Sharpton extortion model with a law degree.
Crump turns on the pressure. He pushes overcharging in the criminal case, as he did against Officer Derek Chauvin in the George Floyd case, to whatever extent he can. If prosecutors lose the criminal case, that just means more unrest and a bigger payout in the civil case.
The bigger the riots, the bigger the settlement.
The George Floyd riots caused an estimated $500 million worth of damage with over 400 buildings damaged in the Twin Cities. And that probably influenced the $27 million settlement.
All of this is good news for Crump and bad news for America.
The lynch mobs do their dirty work and the “civil rights lawyer” gets richer. Shop owners lose their businesses and their dreams.
Ordinary people lose their lives.
Two police officers were shot at one protest for Breonna Taylor and seven were shot at another Taylor protest. This was just a small part of the violence unleashed by the lynch mobs which wrongly exploited Taylor’s death due to her drug dealer boyfriend to spread violence and hate.
But when Ben Crump isn’t thinking about settlements, he’s talking revolution.
“Legalized discrimination is a thread woven so tightly into the tapestry of America that it is impossible to eradicate it without unraveling that tapestry,” Crump concludes in his book.
America’s tapestry has been torn apart since the racial hate mongering of the Obama years helped create the Black Lives Matter movement and its false campaign against the police.
And Crump is one of the most dangerous leftist radicals unraveling America.
Finally, Polybius’ link of tyrannic ambition to mediocre politicians who “hanker after office, and find that they cannot achieve it through their own efforts or on their merits,” describes Biden to a T. Biden is a long-time senator with few legislative achievements he still will own, a vicious pit-bull on the Senate Judiciary Committee where he shamelessly demagogued Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, a plagiarizer and unseemly harasser of women, a two-time loser in his bid for the presidency, a fabulist and grifter who monetized the office of Vice President to enrich his family, and a lightweight so light that his own boss, Barack Obama, said, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.” Only a pandemic, disruptive lock-downs, and the Democrat primary threat of socialist Bernie Sanders––along with a probably fraudulent election, and a groveling media running interference–– could get such a meritless mediocrity into the Oval Office.
A Blueprint for Tyranny
A new administration leverages street-violence for political gain.
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
The vulnerability of political freedom and popular sovereignty to tyranny has been a constant theme in political philosophy for 2500 years. It profoundly influenced the creators of the Constitution, an important purpose of which is to forestall the tyranny that destroys political freedom and citizen rule. In the writings of Classical philosophers and historians the Founders could see the blueprint for such a tyranny––one we have seen unfolding in the last few decades, and accelerating in the policies of the current administration.
The Greek historian Polybius in the second century B.C. laid out how a democracy degenerates into tyranny:
So when [the rich] begin to hanker after office, and find that they cannot achieve it through their own efforts or on their merits, they begin to seduce and corrupt the people in every possible way, and thus ruin their estates. The result is that through their senseless craving for prominence they stimulate among the masses both an appetite for bribes and the habit of receiving them, and then the rule of democracy is transformed into government by violence and strong-arm methods. By this time the people have become accustomed to feed at the expense of others, and their prospects of winning a livelihood depend upon the property of their neighbors, and as soon as they find a leader who is sufficiently ambitious and daring . . . they introduce a regime based on violence.
Many of these preconditions already exist in our country. Since Roosevelt’s New Deal, ambitious politicians of both parties have “stimulate[d] among the masses both an appetite for bribes and the habit of receiving them.” We call them “entitlements” rather than “bribes,” funded not by violently seizing the property of the rich, but by annually redistributing $1.6 trillion of the wealth of the upper middle class and the rich through the federal income tax. Indeed, the top one percent of all earners pays 40% of income taxes. The modern update of ancient “bribes” also comprises massive borrowing and electronically printing money. These practices have created nearly $27 trillion in government debt, five trillion more than GDP. The tyrants of Polybius’ day redistributed the wealth of the rich; today we redistribute the future wealth of the young and unborn who will be stuck with the bill.
And this largess will increase dramatically if the current administration successfully passes into law several new mechanisms for redistributing wealth:
- $1.9 trillion America Rescue Plan
- $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan
- $1.8 trillion American Families Plan
- $1 trillion Green New Deal for Cities
- $180 billion Green New Deal for Public Housing
- $15 trillion over 15 years Thrive Act
Most of this money will be spent on various transfers to voters, and subsidies to favored businesses and feckless state governments that run their own redistribution engines.
As for “government by violence and strong-arm methods,” modern tyranny for decades has relied on de Tocqueville’s “soft despotism,” an insidious coercion through a regulatory regime that Tocqueville predicted, one which “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate.” All the money to be redistributed will come with a plethora of such intrusive regulations from the agencies managing it. These rules and regulations limit citizen freedom in numerous ways, from what they can do with their own property to how they run their own businesses, all accompanied by fines and fees that extract even more revenue.
During Donald Trump’s presidency, however, we saw another form of “strong-arm methods.” The politicizing of the FBI, the CIA, and the DOJ, along with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation–– agencies with coercive investigative powers backed by military-level lethal force–– produced the tyrannical bullying of several members of Trump’s administration, most egregiously General Michael Flynn. Meanwhile, old-fashioned physical violence and intimidation in the streets dogged Trump’s political rallies, and even followed Trump supporters to restaurants and other public venues.
Just as Biden’s redistributive ambitions have gone far beyond what passes for “normal,” the violence in the streets last year exploded to levels not seen since the Sixties. Led by Antifa and Black Lives Matter, these “peaceful protestors” looted, burned, and vandalized cities across the country, the mayhem mysteriously abating in time for the election. Billions of dollars in property damage and scores of killed and wounded were the toll. Just the threat of such violence undoubtedly intimidated the judge and jurors in the Derek Chauvin trial. Why else wouldn’t the judge approve a change in venue, or sequester the jurors?
Violence is now the trump card in daily politics and culture. Corporations have gone “woke,” sending millions of dollars to Black Lives Matter and promoting their “systemic racism” lie. City governments and public school districts must factor in the chance of violent protests in their policy decisions. Even worse, the principle of equality before the law, a bedrock of political freedom, has been abandoned for political favoritism, in part because authorities are wary of igniting violence. Derek Chauvin was convicted of two murder charges, decisions not even close to being beyond a reasonable doubt. But the unidentified DC cop who murdered a protestor at the Capitol on January 6––a woman veteran who was not threatening the officer’s, or anybody’s, life––has not even suffered professional sanction, let alone an indictment and trial.
Violence for me, but not for thee.
Worse yet, Antifa has openly said that their violence is a tool of intimidation in the pursuit of political goals. CrimetheInc., an Antifa ally, has bragged that the outcome of the Chauvin trial was due to the street violence. It goes on to make explicit this link between violence and political aims: “You put yourself in a weaker bargaining position by spelling out from the beginning the least it would take to appease you. It’s smarter to appear implacable: So you want to come to terms? Make us an offer. In the meantime, we’ll be here blocking the freeway and setting things on fire.” This tactic is exactly what Hitler instructed his Sudetenland Nazi stooge, Konrad Henlein, to do in negotiations with the Czech government in 1938: “We must always demand so much that we cannot be satisfied.” What “satisfied” the Nazis was the destruction of Czechoslovakia.
What is disturbingly different from the Sixties, moreover, about last year’s violence is that the Democrat establishment has not just tolerated the violence, but often encouraged and promoted it––just as Representative Maxine Waters did during the Chauvin trial when she incited protestors to get “confrontational” if the wrong verdict was given. Apprehended rioters were rarely charged or tried, and police forces were ordered to stand down, or forbidden to use crowd-control tools. Many mayors seemed to embrace the philosophy of Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings, who during the riots in 2015 told the press, “We gave them [rioters] space to destroy.”
As Daniel Henninger suggests, this tactical use of violence may be why the Biden administration has not even tried to make a deal by compromising with Republicans, despite the Democrats’ razor-thin margin in the House and Senate, or the lack of a popular mandate. Instead, the administration wants to bully Americans into accepting their policies:
Mr. Biden is no street anarchist, but the political “change” confronting Americans after more than a year living with Covid—constant antipolice protests, migrants streaming across the southern border, D.C. statehood, blowing up the legislative filibuster, packing the Supreme Court and some $6 trillion in new federal spending—is a lot of nonnegotiable bulldozer.
Finally, Polybius’ link of tyrannic ambition to mediocre politicians who “hanker after office, and find that they cannot achieve it through their own efforts or on their merits,” describes Biden to a T. Biden is a long-time senator with few legislative achievements he still will own, a vicious pit-bull on the Senate Judiciary Committee where he shamelessly demagogued Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, a plagiarizer and unseemly harasser of women, a two-time loser in his bid for the presidency, a fabulist and grifter who monetized the office of Vice President to enrich his family, and a lightweight so light that his own boss, Barack Obama, said, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.” Only a pandemic, disruptive lock-downs, and the Democrat primary threat of socialist Bernie Sanders––along with a probably fraudulent election, and a groveling media running interference–– could get such a meritless mediocrity into the Oval Office.
If the Biden administration is successful at leveraging street-violence for political gain, the century-old progressive dream of transforming our Constitutional Republic into a tyrannical technocracy will be much closer to fulfillment, our country’s fisc much closer to bankruptcy, and our government much closer to a “regime based on violence.”
On that dismal day, we won’t be able to say that we hadn’t been warned for 2500 years.
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