Unworthy of justice: When ideology determines victims

There is a growing ideological trend that seeks to deprive those broadly considered to being “on the right” of any and all rights, through dehumanization and the systematic exclusion from key institutions.

Most of us expect such an attitude among young college students, who have limited life experience and have not yet met the human beings with whom they disagree and about whose lives they are so cavalier. But this ideological malice is far more pervasive than that. No longer seen as extreme, we live among those who maintain a sort of nonchalant malevolence. Those who have redefined speech as violence need little help in the justification of retribution against their enemies.

I lived this reality in a small way when I was made a victim of a minor crime in an American city.

It was a cold Sunday afternoon in February. I was recovering from illness and had returned home after Mass to change into more casual attire. Thereafter, I ventured outside with my small dog, Leo, for a quiet afternoon walk. After walking about 100 yards up the hill, a white SUV pulled up rapidly a few yards in front of me, and the passenger-side window rolled down. A friend lived in that house, and it was not her car, making it all the more strange.

I turned my head as I walked by, only to see the driver performing a sex act while staring at me angrily. I continued walking and took another street, hopeful that perhaps I had misinterpreted what I had seen. Then, as I looked ahead down this new street, I saw the white SUV once again, this time facing me. The driver had moved his car so that I might walk past him again, at which time he repeated his action. Again, he made eye contact and stared with rage.

After passing his car, I looked back and acquired his license plate and other key details about his vehicle. When I returned home, I called and notified the police.

At first, law enforcement seemed uninterested, unless it could be shown that I was not this man’s first victim. Social media posts indicated that this was a growing pattern for him.

Finally, charges were filed, and he was arrested.

Through his lawyer, he attempted to get the charges dropped in exchange for community service. I fought against that, telling the DA’s office that this was not a slip by an otherwise upstanding citizen, but a precursor by a disordered man. Rage and sex do not coexist in healthy people. The perpetrator needs to at least have a record, for the sake of his next victim.

After a series of delays and canceled court dates, we finally met each other in court. I testified to what had happened, and the District Attorney’s office tried to bring the other victims to light, but those women had not gotten the perpetrator’s license plate. Thus, they were dismissed as hearsay and did not count.

With me as the only remaining witness, his lawyer decided on a character assassination. “Do you think the West is in decline?” he asked incredulously. I was confused because I thought that was demonstrable. Could it really be true that some people think our society is going in a positive direction?

“You’re a cultural commentator, aren’t you?” he asked pointedly.

When asked about the purpose of this line of questioning, he began reading a highly curated list of titles from my work over the years.

“America isn’t Racist Enough,” he began. It was a sarcastic title for a piece about how the country clearly is not racist enough for those who are faking their own hate crimes.

“Why Not To Celebrate MLK Jr. Day,” he continued. I oppose the holiday and Martin Luther King’s veneration because it is bad for a society to herald the morally unscrupulous, even when most people do not know the details thereof (which I explained in a video by that title).

He continued reading off other headlines, as the majority-black courtroom turned cold. I was not allowed to respond or explain. In that moment, I saw how precarious justice becomes when a person’s rights depend not on objective evidence but on whether one’s beliefs offend the sensibilities of the room.

The lawyer’s claim was really two-fold—the first explicit, and the second implicit:

1. That my accusation against his (white) client was merely fodder for a video/essay.
2. That my alleged racism should deprive me of justice in a courtroom.

If the first claim were taken to its natural end, then all writers, journalists, and commentators would have no right to justice. They would sacrifice all meaningful protections of the state at the picking up of a pen. Anything that happens to them could become a story, and so they cannot be trusted to report their maltreatment. Nevermind the obvious truth that if they wanted to invent stories, they could do so without involving law enforcement and blaming innocent people.

The second, and implicit, claim is more pernicious. The man whom I accused was white, so the accusation was not that my testimony was biased against a black man, but that my ideology should deprive me of the right to legal redress. It was that my moral character is such that criminal actions against me ought to be ignored. If my viewpoints on entirely unrelated topics are egregious enough to the court, then maybe it is actually okay that it happened.

The judge, to her credit, found the perpetrator guilty, for which he served all of eight community service hours, but at least now carries a criminal record.

The significance of this story is not that my worldview was grossly misrepresented (though it was), but that there is a growing notion that some people deserve to be victims as a result of their ideology. We see it every time a new video shows a group of 15 people kicking an unconscious victim on the ground, and commentators ask, “But what did he say first?”

A Portland jury found a black man, Gary Edwards, not guilty of assault after stabbing a white man with a knife because it was alleged that the white man had used a racial slur, and thus the stabbing was “self-defense.” Security cameras showed Edwards approaching his prey with the fixed-blade knife in hand, while the victim sat on a bench. Edwards is a homeless man with a long history of criminal behavior, including a prior assault. None of that mattered as much as what the victim said.

We saw the same mentality in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s shooting, when people dug through hundreds of hours of footage, searching for his most ‘offensive’ statements, so that they could justify what had happened to him and his family. Thousands of educated people in respectable careers jumped online after his death to blame him for having the audacity to speak.

This ideology exists in courtrooms across America. It is not exclusively the domain of young ideologues anymore. It is held by lawyers, medical professionals, teachers, and many of the people you know.

My experience was a reminder that the erosion of rights never begins with mass movements or sweeping laws, but with the quiet shift in what people believe others deserve. A country cannot survive when justice is reduced from an objective absolute to a negotiable idea that is only seized when the victims and perpetrators align with our cultural vendettas. If we do not confront this mindset clearly, publicly, and without fear, then the next victim of “deserved” violence will not be an exception. It will be the new normal.