On my radio show this past Sunday evening I had a brilliant young attorney, Kim Corral, speaking about the inequalities she’s encountered in the criminal justice system as they apply to race and gender. Her passion, dedication and knowledge in regards to her chosen profession should make all lawyers proud.
At one point, she was discussing a particularly egregious sentence where a 16-year-old boy received a 28-year term of incarceration for an assault and robbery. Kim’s position was that the young man most likely could be rehabilitated by his 21st birthday and his sentence was overly punitive. I wholeheartedly agreed.
However, we had a caller that wanted to defend such draconian sentences because “the recidivism rate in the state of Ohio is 70 percent.” When we corrected him and said that the recidivism rate is 27 percent (and my co-host Rachel Hill went to the computer and punched up the site of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections, which backed up our figure as accurate), he said that he still didn’t believe it.
I then asked him if he had a computer so that he could look the figure up for himself. He said that it wouldn’t make any difference because he wasn’t going to change his mind — the figure was 70 percent, no matter what the official state prison site has posted. In other words, if someone like tRump has told him the recidivism rate in Ohio is 70 percent, nothing is going to change his mind: nothing, not even real facts.
That’s when the eyes of all of us in the studio rolled back in our collective head because we realized that, in spite of the caller initially sounding like an intelligent human being, he obviously was mentally existing in some sort of parallel universe. He, like many others, was flat-out refusing to accept a fact that didn’t jibe with his Trump-inspired version of reality — a reality that allowed him to hold fast to his hatreds.
This falls right in line with the chant of “Send her back!” in spite of the fact that three of the four women of color who are members of Congress tRump was referring to were born in this country. Which begs the question, send them back — to where? He uses the racists’ trick of calling others a racist.
It’s time we woke up and realized that no matter what the truth is: tRump’s supporters are going to stick with their P.T. Barnum-like charlatan no matter what he says or what new information of his misdeeds have been discovered. The simple fact is, they might know that he’s a phony but they really don’t care.
At this stage of his presidency, the only thing this narcissistic megalomaniac really is interested in is the same thing Barnum was interested in: Filling up a big tent with the warm bodies of rubes and hicks. As long as he can continue to draw large crowds with his divisive rhetoric he really doesn’t care if he’s expanding or shrinking his base of voters for the upcoming election. He really doesn’t plan that far ahead.
Like most people who think like a juvenile, he’s only focused on the “right now.” His only interest is the size of the crowd at his next rally. It makes no difference to him if it’s made up of the same people, traveling from town to town, following him like a bunch of demented Juggalos.
Look up the Insane Clown Posse and then you’ll understand.
From CoolCleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author at http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.