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James Hickman
James Hickman (aka Simon Black) is an international investor, entrepreneur, and founder of Sovereign Man. His free daily e-letter Notes from the Field is about using the experiences from his life and travels to help you achieve more freedom, make more money, keep more of it, and protect it all from bankrupt governments.
On August 4, 2017, the most hated person in the world was sentenced to seven years in prison.
You may remember the case: his name is Martin Shkreli.
Shkreli had quite infamously taken over a pharmaceutical company and jacked up the price of a medication by 50x, practically overnight. Media outrage ensued, and Shkreli – an young, arrogant braggadocio with far more ego than compassion, was summoned to explain himself to angry politicians in Congress.
Shkreli smirked and insulted his way through the Congressional hearing, leading countless people to conclude he was the biggest jerk on the planet.
And, shortly thereafter, Shkreli was raided and prosecuted by the Justice Department on charges of securities fraud.
Now this guy was no Honest Abe. But he wasn’t Bernie Madoff either. And it’s worth pointing out that not a single one of Shkreli’s investors lost money.
I have no doubt that Shkreli stretched the truth with investors; the financial industry is filled with sharks who lie to investors all the time. But those people are rarely charged or prosecuted – including the vast majority of the liars and thieves from the 2008 financial crisis.
You might remember Goldman Sachs bankers referred to their customers as “muppets” and bragged about selling them “shitty deals” and terrible investments. Zero jail time for them.
Shkreli was prosecuted because people hated him… and the government put him behind bars.
I wrote at the time that Shkreli’s arrest and prosecution represented a dark day for the justice system; it proved that you can be prosecuted in the land of the free, simply because people don’t like you.
Bizarrely I received a lot of hate mail from that article from people who accused me of defending Shkreli. I wasn’t. I was arguing that the government shouldn’t put people they don’t like in jail.
Naturally, the passionate ignoramuses cling to their mantra that “no one is above the law”. But that’s complete BS.
The amount of local, state, and federal crimes on the books could fill an entire football stadium. Every single person reading this right now is guilty of violating some rule, statute, or regulation without even knowing it.
How could anybody possibly keep up with all the rules and laws that change every single day and are constantly expanding.
In fact, just last year they added 79,066 pages to the Federal Register. Yet they also claim that “ignorance of the law is not an excuse”. It’s absurd.
There used to be sacrosanct standards of the justice system. Victims would come forward and allege a crime had taken place. The crime would be investigated, a suspect would be found, then prosecutors would bring charges.
Most importantly, the suspect would then be presumed innocent until convicted by a dispassionate prosecutor and impartial jury.
Now that system is completely distorted.
Politicians run for elected prosecutor offices (like District Attorney or state Attorney General) with the same zeal and vigor as if they were running for President.
They’re funded by fanatical leftists like George Soros, and they make campaign promises to target and prosecute political opponents.
Then, rather than investigate a crime to find an individual suspect, they investigate the individual and find a crime… even if it means inventing a new crime by stretching the law beyond reason.
Then they select the jurisdiction most suitable for their case – where the defendant is the most hated – virtually guaranteeing that there will in no way be a fair trial.
Putting Donald Trump on trial in New York City is like putting Benjamin Netanyahu on trial in Iran and expecting the Ayatollah to issue a fair and impartial judgment.
But this is the justice system now. As I wrote years ago during the Shkreli affair, “it really paints the picture when you realize that a member of the political elite can merely point his/her thumb like Caesar at the Colosseum, and then gun-toting federal agents come swarming in with a laundry list of charges.”
And it was the same thing in the recent civil trial brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James – who also campaigned on convicting Trump. She claimed that he overstated the value of his real estate assets to secure favorable loans.
But there was no victim. The banks that gave the loans said they lost no money and would be happy to do business with Trump again.
Again, though he’s neither Bernie Madoff nor Honest Abe, such practices are pretty standard in the industry. Bankers know this. They’re not stupid. Of course, borrowers inflate their assets.
The practice is so commonplace, in fact, that the Governor of New York had to assure other real estate developers (who were panicking and fleeing the state) that no one else would be prosecuted for those charges. Only Trump.
The outcome of the case was so lopsided that the judge had to practically invent a new form of mathematics to justify the outrageous penalty he ordered.
In 1998, then President Bill Clinton paid $850,000 to a woman who had accused him of sexual assault. The money was part of a legal settlement which included a nondisclosure agreement to keep the woman quiet. No charges were brought against him.
Hillary, of course, wiped her private email servers before handing them over to FBI investigators… which is an obvious crime. She admitted to this. No charges were brought.
No charges have been brought against Joe Biden for illegally storing classified documents. No charges have been brought against anyone on the Epstein client list.
The word justice comes from the Latin word justitia, which means righteousness. And, quite amazingly, the leftists who are cheering the perversion of the justice system right now are full of their bloated sense of righteousness.
They truly believe this is justice.
But they have memories like goldfish and have completely forgotten that the left is a tribe of cannibals: sooner or later, the leftists eat their own kind.
The people cheering right now will inevitably one day say the wrong thing. They’ll use the wrong pronouns. They have the wrong thought. They’ll fail to bend the knee, raise the fist, say the name, storm the university building, or engage in whatever ritualistic virtue signaling comes next.
Then they could find themselves at the business end of the perverted justice system that they’re cheering right now.
Who knows where it goes from here. Will the political opponents on the right ‘turn the other cheek’, or will it be full blown civil lawfare?
(If so, I would humbly suggest that Tony Fauci likely has a laundry list of actual good reasons to be prosecuted.)
The US has crossed the Rubicon.
We saw the preview during the 2020 summer of love riots, and Covid hysteria. People were canceled, fired, blacklisted, and denounce by loved ones for daring to disagree with the narrative.
But at least it didn’t leverage the full resources of the justice system.
Now, countless people on the woke left are full of bloodlust and cheering for the perversion of the justice system. They don’t realize that one day it might be used against them.
Everybody ought to recognize this is now the legal standard in America. And to think that it ends here is naive.
