Inversion Blender Stuck on Highest Setting [Updated]

One of the invariable features of a high-profile criminal trial is the “here’s who’s on the jury” story: eight men, four women; six white jurors, four Asians, two Latinos; four government employees, two corporate marketing executives, a plumber from Smallville, and five disheveled Substack writers. American courts are open, and the American press is almost entirely free to describe what happens in the courtroom.

Voir dire is public, so the press isn’t describing anything that you couldn’t just go see for yourself. Courts usually save some seats for the press, some seats for the families of victims and the accused, and some seats for any randos who feel like lining up at the courthouse door to try to watch. You can go to the courtroom in your city in the morning and watch a court pick jurors for a criminal trial, because you live in America. Management extends apologies for that last sentence to our readers in other countries.

Here’s a story from May 2, 2022: “The I-Team has acquired the list of jurors from the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, including the names and demographics of those who participated.” They didn’t print the names, because juror names are shielded from public disclosure, sometimes by judicial order and sometimes by way of reasonable social custom. But juror descriptions are always fair game, because they sit in judgment in an open society. Pick a high-profile criminal trial and test this theory with the search engine of your choice. Here’s the jury in the George Zimmerman trial, for example. The jury in the O.J. Simpson murder trial was made up of “8 blacks, 2 Hispanics, 1 half-Caucasian, half Native American, and 1 Caucasian female.” Notice that we know that.

Now, to say the words that always make me start heaving long and exasperated heavy sighs, Ruth Ben-Ghiat. If you’re not familiar with this horrible person, she’s an NYU professor and a constant MSNBC babbler. So.

Jesse Watters described judicially unprotected information from a public trial in an open courtroom. He relayed a juror’s answers to questions in public proceedings. You can roll your eyes at his conclusions, but you can’t possibly get to a single one of Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s conclusions in anything resembling good faith. “This is what authoritarians do.” They talk about events from public trials that happened in open court?

Responding to America’s Dumbest Professor, a pseudonymous commenter noted that “the same juror details were published by Politico and several other news organizations.” And that’s exactly right. Sample reporting in Politico from voir dire in Trump’s Manhattan trial: “The next qualified prospective juror is retired from New York City law enforcement, where he worked as a civilian police photographer and then as a photographer in the corrections department.” OH NO RUTH POLITICO IS LITERALLY ADOLF HITLER.

Endlessly construing normal behavior as a deadly authoritarian crisis, Ruth Ben-Ghiat is America’s catastrophizing crazy wine aunt, all day and every day, publicly. She’s out of her mind, and she’s taking other people with her. Recognizing that Twitter is a grab bag of idiots, here are some sample thoughts from the brave anti-authoritarians who follow her deep wisdom:

You can really feel their hatred for authoritarianism.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is doing this everything-is-Hitler act in increasingly insane form all the time, by the way, but let’s not dig into any more examples. No, really. Go see for yourself, if you’d like. “Insert own vomit emoji here.”

UPDATE:

An alert reader points out these headlines on the front page of the New York Times website on Thursday evening:

THE NEW YORK TIMES IS INVADING POLAND.