Memo to 2020 voters: Jussie Smollett a reminder of who the 'elites' are

The Jussie Smollett case is a reminder of just how powerful elites can be. Jussie was part of the elite and got off scot-free for filing a false hate crime charge. It was no small matter — it was a 16-count felony charge in an airtight case that all of a sudden was dropped. He was off the hook. And good luck to the Chicago cops who will now have a slew of such cases on their hands, with each new miscreant demanding the same treatment. It comes as the scandal of rich leftist parents bribing their way into elite universities for admissions spots for their less than academically stellar children is put forward for us.

It also comes as the leftist monolith at Silicon Valley's social network giants censor conservatives while permitting all sorts of terrorists and glory-seekers to fester and recruit, after which they insist they're just neutral platforms. It also comes as thousands of foreign nationals bust into our country illegally to take a place at the front of the line for meritless asylum claims and several free years of earnings in the States, ahead of those patiently waiting to come here legally. These same people also escape charges for crimes based on their "undocumented" status, get scholarships and free rides other students don't get, take tax credit refunds they never paid into, and steal identities without consequence. With this group, there's a chain of unequal treatments. It also comes as millions of inner-city children get shortchanged on education as city money goes missing or redirected to politically useful things, union employees become millionaires, and nobody ever gets fired for bad performance in longstanding blue-city monoliths. There are always calls for more funds, never for performance-based outcomes. It also comes as Hollywood elites hector us on global warming — while heating up multiple mansions and flying around in CO2-spewing private jets to do it. One set of laws for them, another set for us. It's all over. Now we have the case of Jussie Smollett, let off with 16 dropped felonies and a completely expunged and sealed record. That follows his filing a false police report of a hate crime, smearing conservatives, and then leading the city of Chicago on a wild goose chase, expending thousands in city resources, a crime that would send other people to prison. Smollett had the right politics and the right political machine — and don't think Kamala Harris, Michelle Obama, and Kim Foxx knew it. What the case shows is that we do have a ruling class, and that ruling class is socialist. It's not at all different, actually, from what we see in other long-festering socialist societies, in fact. Chicago is a longtime socialist city government, and Smollett is a member of its elite. The nexus is that it's the work of the socialist left, which, as a matter of fact, has been ensconced in power for quite a long time. The same people who claim to stand up for the little guy against the dreaded conservatives, the giant corporations, some big thing somewhere, are amazingly exposed as a Soviet-style nomenklatura whose elites live lives of impunity. It's not a bug, but a feature of all socialist systems to see this phenomenon. In the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union, the children of the Kremlin elites were always let off for the crimes committed, while Russians committing the same sorts of transgressions — drunk driving, thievery, mismanagement of funds — were packed off to the Gulag. China has the same nomenklatura setup within its crony socialist system — its "princelings" are largely immune to any obligation to follow laws, unless they're caught up in a power struggle. The law itself is irrelevant at their levels. Don't forget today's Venezuela, of course, where the president dines out on steak in Turkey while the locals literally starve. If you're in the elites there, you eat well. If you're not, you lose 24 pounds a year, based on your inability to access dollars, or, for that matter, even work for money that can buy things. And don't forget that the Castro family in Cuba, those socialist champions of the little guys who so entranced Michael Moore, are billionaires. Yet strangely, we see socialism recrudescing in the personae of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Rep. Ilhan Omar. Socialism is all about equality, they say; socialism is all about standing up for the little guy. And these people are no longer raving lunatics on street corners, the Smollett case demonstrates that these people already have real power. Socialism is always characterized by the formation of politically connected elites, and those elites are always above the law. There are no exceptions to this; we see it in the crummiest socialist hellholes, the grandest socialist countries, and in the U.S. blue cities run by socialists. Every socialist system has its winners and losers; they're just not the winners and losers whom socialists advertise. One can only hope that as election 2020 comes upon us, and the socialist Kultursmog runs thick, with every Democratic presidential candidate calling for more of it, that this is what is going to come to mind for voters. Image credit: Jussie Smollett, Dominic D, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.