© Jack Cashill
AmericanThinker.com - May 4, 2015 

If anyone doubted before Friday that the postmodern lynch mob era is in full swing, Baltimore state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby put those doubts to rest.

“To the youth of the city,” said Mosby (pictured), “I will seek justice on your behalf. This is a moment. This is your moment. Let’s insure we have peaceful and productive rallies that will develop structural and systemic changes for generations to come. You’re at the forefront of this cause and as young people, our time is now."

The “justice” she alluded to were charges ranging from false imprisonment to second-degree depraved murder against six Baltimore police officers involved in arresting and transporting the late Freddie Gray. Unlike lynch mob leaders of yore who set out to subvert the law, postmodernists like Mosby subvert the language to give the illusion that they are supporting the law, if not elevating it.

In reality, the “youth of the city” just burned much of it down, focused their wrath on non-blacks especially the Asian shopkeepers in their midst, and injured some 100 Baltimore cops in the process as well as many civilians. The notion that they were clamoring for “justice” is as delusional as the notion that Mosby’s “systemic change” would do them any good. Caught up in the grievance narrative pushed for the last six years by the postmodernist-in-chief, Barack Obama, the “youth” were clamoring for revenge.

It is understandable why they were. Three years earlier the media assured the “youth” over and over that a young black boy out to buy Skittles and iced tea for his little brother was, in the immortal words of Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, “hunted down like a rabid dog.” To reinforce this message, the major media, in full violation of journalistic ethics, repeatedly showed images of a pre-pubescent Trayvon Martin, not recent images of the six-foot, street-fighting, dope-smoking delinquent that Martin had become.

CBS, NBC, CNN and especially ABC each not only misreported the Zimmerman case but also manufactured “evidence” to convince the public of Zimmerman’s guilt. The New York Times turned George Zimmerman, who was more Hispanic than Obama was African American, into a “white Hispanic” to better fit the prevailing narrative of racial injustice.

As to Obama, he not only chose sides, but he also presented his bias in racial terms. “My main message is to the parents of Trayvon,” he said for the ages, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”

“Arrest Zimmerman now,” Al Sharpton shouted to a Florida mob a month after the shooting. The State of Florida obliged. “We had to march to even get a trial,” said Sharpton in one of his more honest moments. Although the trial proved to any objective observer that Zimmerman should never even have been arrested, the victimhood narrative had been so fixed in place that the great majority of blacks and liberals thought Zimmerman’s acquittal a grave injustice.

“Trayvon Martin is Our Emmett Till; Our Jury Selection Process Is No Better Now That It Was In 1955,” read an all too typical headline of a Daily Kos article that denounced an “all-white jury,” one of whose six members was black.

Unchastened by their misreporting of the Zimmerman case, the media turned their attention to Ferguson, Missouri, two years later and shamelessly repeated the mischief. They swapped out the “little boy” for the “gentle giant” and the symbolic hoodie for the symbolic “hands up, don’t shoot” gesture.

So invested were the postmodernists in their narrative that the release of the store video outraged them. As they told the story, Michael Brown, like Trayvon Martin, was a bright young man on the way to college, not a vicious thug and thief. The Ferguson police had no right to spoil the story. When the grand jury delivered real justice, not postmodern “justice,” the youth of Ferguson responded by burning the town down. Apparently, “our time” had yet to arrive in Ferguson.

In the South Carolina shooting of Walter Scott by Officer Michael Slager, the grievance industry had a better case, but state authorities short-circuited the rage manufacturing machinery by overcharging Slager with second-degree murder.

An instructive moment occurred days later when conservative black activist Jesse Lee Peterson appeared on the Sean Hannity show with black civil rights attorney Leo Terrell. To Peterson’s contention that “in America you are innocent until proven guilty,” Terrell responded, “You are an embarrassment to the world right now!” When Peterson added, “All that I’m saying is that we should wait for due process,” the “civil rights” attorney stormed off the set.

Terrell’s outburst spoke to the ultimate linguistic twist of postmodern justice: the postmodern “civil rights” movement has fully rejected the civil rights that the real civil rights movement fought for, among those rights equality before the law, due process, and the notion that an accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

From the days of Sacco and Vanzetti on, leftists had invested a great deal of emotional capital in claiming the guilty innocent. They particularly liked to declare groups of guilty people innocent—the “Jena Six,” the “Chicago Seven (or Eight),” the “Catonsville Nine.” Beginning with the Zimmerman case, they switched tactics and began to insist the innocent were guilty, a darker turn altogether.

Now America has a genuine collective of the unjustly accused, the six officers that the New York Daily News casually describes as the “suspected killers” of Freddie Gray, the Baltimore Six. But now leftists are the ones doing the accusing.

So keen were Mosby and her supporters on convincing those who were “angry, hurt or have their own experiences of injustice at the hands of police officers,” she charged three black officers along with three white ones.

The driver of the transport vehicle Caesar Goodson Jr., an African American, faces the most serious charges, including second-degree depraved murder, manslaughter, and second-degree assault. By Mosby’s own account, Goodson never laid a hand on Gray and stopped more than once to check on his status.

The last of the pre-postmodern civil rights activists, Harvard’s Allen Dershowitz, said there was “no plausible, hypothetical, conceivable case for murder” and called Mosby out for creating a “show trial.” Said Dershowitz all too accurately, “This is a very sad day for justice.”

"There are some police departments that have to do some soul-searching,” said Barack Obama in regards to the death of Freddie Gray. The Baltimore Police, like police everywhere, have to be doing some soul searching right now. They are undoubtedly asking themselves, “Why do we bother?”