When the jury declared Daniel Penny not guilty of the reckless homicide of Jordan Neely, the activists from Black Lives Matter were outraged and staged a mostly peaceful protest. Obviously, the Jordan Neely death has been made political on both sides of the political divide, with ex-Marine Daniel Penny getting an invite from Marine vet JD Vance to attend the Army-Navy game with him and Donald Trump and Elon Musk and Uncle Tom Cobbley.

In the best of all possible worlds, we Hobbits want the criminal justice system separated from politics. If someone is accused of breaking the peace, then lawyers and judges and witnesses and juries should work it out; no activists need apply. But rulers don’t believe in process, and none more than our lefty friends, from the French Revolution onwards, through Stalin and Mao Zedong right down to our present lefty woke culture and Soros prosecutors like Alvin Bragg. Did you know that in the first nine chapters of Mao’s Little Red Book the word “enemy” appears 77 times and the word “enemies” appears 15 times?

If you want to know what it is like to be an enemy of the lefty state, then Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai is your go-to source. Cheng, a woman of staggering courage and determination, tells the story of Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. She was imprisoned in solitary confinement and interrogated in No. 1 Detention House for six years starting in 1966, because she might have interacted with British spies and be an enemy of the Chinese people.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was all about power: Mao reasserting himself against rivals. Its vibe helps you understand the mindset of our lefty friends, and why they would think that it was racist for white oppressor Marine vet Penny to choke a victimized black to death. It makes complete sense that they would conduct lawfare against President Trump and his associates, because for the Left, it’s all about power.

I keep thinking: what is the difference between the Left’s culture of using the state to make war on its enemies and the culture of a man like Daniel Penny who just steps up to protect his fellow citizens? What is the difference between the extraordinary bravery of Nien Cheng and the cowardice of her acquaintances who avoided her for years and then resumed contact after her rehabilitation?

It’s the difference between a bully and a hero. What is Alvin Bragg? A state-sponsored bully. What is Daniel Penny? A simple hero. What has Joe Biden been in Washington D.C. for the past 50 years? A bully. What is Donald Trump, the man that stood up immediately after being shot and shouted: “Fight! Fight! Fight!” A hero.

What is our lefty friends’ culture of activism and protest all about? I say it is intimidation. That is what bullies do. That’s what the Biden administration has been doing to Donald Trump. That is what the BLM boys and girls were doing during the Penny trial.

It’s easy to intimidate and bully when you are a credentialed expert or activist in the educated class. You go with the crowd; you recite the woke responses. You get your academic credentials and then sit out your life as a tenured lifer. You cosplay a revolutionary at regime-adjacent mostly-peaceful protests. You cancel your Time subscription when Trump gets named Person of the Year.

But there is hope: the 50-year-old culture of the tech bros, a culture of courage and risk. It takes enormous courage to form a tech startup. It takes huge persistence and luck to make it profitable. But then the successful tech lord runs into government regulation and activist lawfare; he becomes a target for bullies. No wonder the tech lords took the knee to the ruling class and the Censorship Industrial Complex during and after the late COVID unpleasantness. And so it would still be today if the courageous hero Elon Musk had not bucked the trend and bought Twitter/X. Could the courageous Donald Trump have won the presidency without the censorship pushback from Musk? Would the rest of the tech lords -- from Marc Andreessen to Mark Zuckerberg to Jeff Bezos -- have dared to buck the system without Musk’s crazy courage or Trump’s heroic victory?

As the new Trump Age dawns on January 20, we have an opportunity to celebrate the culture of courage symbolized by Trump and Musk and Penny. And we can rain scorn on the culture of intimidation and bullying that has always been and always will be the culture of the Left.

Marx had it almost right:

“Let the ruling class bullies tremble at the middle-class rebellion. The ordinary middle class has nothing to lose but its fear. It has a world to win. Middle-class bros of all countries unite!”

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: PickPik