Mob Justice Quotes

He was giving up on keeping me alive, letting nature–or rather mob justice–take its course. When he returned, and I was dead, he wouldn't hold anyone responsible. He would not mourn. All this I could hear in those three words.

Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like Negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty?

People use democracy as a free-floating abstraction disconnected from reality. Democracy in and of itself is not necessarily good. Gang rape, after all, is democracy in action. All men have the right to live their own life. Democracy must be rooted in a rational philosophy that first and foremost recognizes the right of an individual. A few million Imperial Order men screaming for the lives of a much smaller number of people in the New World may win a democratic vote, but it does not give them the right to those lives, or make their calls for such killing right. Democracy is not a synonym for justice or for freedom. Democracy is not a sacred right sanctifying mob rule. Democracy is a principle that is subordinate to the inalienable rights of the individual.

They went up against white mobs, water hoses, vicious dogs, the Ku Klux Klan, trigger-happy nightstick-wielding police, armed only with their belief in justice and their desire for freedom.

I think one of the sweetest lessons taught by the Prophet, and yet one of the saddest, occurred close to the time of his death. He was required to leave his plan and vision of the Rocky Mountains and give himself up to face a court of supposed justice. These are his words: 'I am going like a lamb to the slaughter; but I am calm as a summer's morning; I have a conscience void of offense towards God, and towards all men' (D&C 135:4). That statement of the Prophet teaches us obedience to law and the importance of having a clear conscience toward God and toward our fellowmen. The Prophet Joseph Smith taught these principles--by example. There was to be one great final lesson before his mortal life ended. He was incarcerated in Carthage Jail with his brother Hyrum, with John Taylor, and with Willard Richards. The angry mob stormed the jail; they came up the stairway, blasphemous in their cursing, heavily armed, and began to fire at will. Hyrum was hit and died. John Taylor took several balls of fire within his bosom. The Prophet Joseph, with his pistol in hand, was attempting to defend his life and that of his brethren, and yet he could tell from the pounding on the door that this mob would storm that door and would kill John Taylor and Willard Richards in an attempt to kill him. And so his last great act here upon the earth was to leave the door and lead Willard Richards to safety, throw the gun on the floor, and go to the window, that they might see him, that the attention of this ruthless mob might be focused upon him rather than the others. Joseph Smith gave his life. Willard Richards was spared, and John Taylor recovered from his wounds. 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends' (John 15:13). The Prophet Joseph Smith taught us love--by example.

I am against justice … whenever it is carried out by a mob.

Then the mob parted and there was the boy, with his arms twisted behind his back and the foot of a man, a petrol attendant in Cohydro cap and uniform, stamped firmly on his neck. The boy’s mouth was bleeding and the side of his face was squashed flat on the uneven concrete of the forecourt. It was a scene I had witnessed numerous times during my stint covering Africa. Quick and brutal, African mob justice is a terrifying thing.

It is imperative that all uprising be guided by an urge for justice, not a craving for revenge.

Ignorance and Poverty mixed with incompetent justice system can bleed mob justice.

The actual history of interracial rape - according to FBI statistics - is that, since the 70's, approximately 15,000 to 36,000 white women have been raped by black men every year, while, on average, zero black women are raped by black men." (The Department of Justice uses "0" to denote fewer than ten victims.

A hanging typically occurs after someone is found guilty in the eyes of the law and irredeemable in the eyes of society. A lynching is the killing of an individual for how they look and what they represent to a vigilante mob.

judge catches up to John with the lynch mob he has assembled.

NPR’s Nina Totenberg famously said of Republican senator Jesse Helms, “If there is retributive justice, he’ll get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will get it.”66

Saying down with the blacks but uplift the white race Raising the banner to the sun in haste Mobbed deep, hoods and capes Sun-dried and bloodstained Saying down with the blacks but uplift the white race Unjustly tried an indelible conviction the usual result of five shades of darker skin Justice unjust, black robes and pale face Didn't have a chance, they called us apes I wish I would have known the false smiles Evil intentions fulfilling their taste Why me? Why us? Justice unjust, black robes and pale faces?

Why don't they let us explain who we are?' Derin protested 'It's not fair judging us like that without giving us a chance to speak' Marna laughed mirthlessly. 'Do you think that would help?' she responded. 'The face of fear has neither eyes nor ears. It is blind and deaf to all but its own terrors.

Now at the time of which I was speaking, as the voters were inscribing their ostraka [to determine which politician would be expelled from the city], it is said that an unlettered and utterly boorish fellow handed his ostrakon to Aristides, whom he took to be one of the ordinary crowd, and asked him to write Aristides on it. He, astonished, asked the man what possible wrong Aristides had done him. “None whatever,” was the answer, “I don’t even know the fellow, but I am tired of hearing him everywhere called ‘The Just.’ ” On hearing this, Aristides made no answer, but wrote his name on the ostrakon and handed it back.

There is no questioning the foundational myths of the social justice warrior. If you merely wish to discuss the assumptions or the data, you're a wretched misogynist and anti-diversity. If you doubt their conclusions, you're part of the patriarchy. And if you refuse to kowtow to their demands, they unleash the mob on you.

If you are looking for intelligent life out there in the political world perhaps, the only place you will find it is on campuses or in the letters to the editor or social media. Films and the media distort everything. People think that liberation is a beautiful thing that they are witnessing. That there is a power in coming so close to a theory that resonates with their entire being, their existence, their identity and their ego. Well, the part of the ego that they are most self-conscious of anyway. You can see the ugly side of humanity and decide that it is either your choice to look upon it and act or look away or do nothing in the face of saving your own grace and mercy. Do we leave the state of the nation in the hands of mob justice?

Sentimentality about Lee's story grew even as the harder truths of the book took no root. The story of an innocent black man bravely defended by a white lawyer in the 1930s fascinated millions of readers, despite its uncomfortable exploration of false accusations of rape involving a white woman. Lee's endearing characters, Atticus Finch and his precocious daughter, Scout, captivated readers while confronting them with some of the realities of race and justice in the South. A generation of future lawyers grew up hoping to become the courageous Atticus, who at one point arms himself to protect the defenseless black suspect from an angry mob of white men looking to lynch him. Today, dozens of legal organizations hand out awards in the fictional lawyer's name to celebrate the model of advocacy described in Lee's novel. What is often overlooked is that the black man falsely accused in the story was not successfully defended by Atticus. Tom Robinson, the wrongly accused black defendant, is found guilty. Later he dies when, full of despair, he makes a desperate attempt to escape from prison. He is shot seventeen times in the back by his captors, dying ingloriously but not unlawfully.

I open the books on Right and on ethics; I listen to the professors and jurists; and, my mind full of their seductive doctrines, I admire the peace and justice established by the civil order; I bless the wisdom of our political institutions and, knowing myself a citizen, cease to lament I am a man. Thoroughly instructed as to my duties and my happiness, I close the book, step out of the lecture room, and look around me. I see wretched nations groaning beneath a yoke of iron. I see mankind ground down by a handful of oppressors, I see a famished mob, worn down by sufferings and famine, while the rich drink the blood and tears of their victims at their ease. I see on every side the strong armed with the terrible powers of the Law against the weak. And all this is done quietly and without resistance. It is the peace of Ulysses and his comrades, imprisoned in the cave of the Cyclops and waiting their turn to be devoured. We must groan and be silent. Let us for ever draw a veil over sights so terrible. I lift my eyes and look to the horizon. I see fire and flame, the fields laid waste, the towns put to sack. Monsters! where are you dragging the hapless wretches? I hear a hideous noise. What a tumult and what cries! I draw near; before me lies a scene of murder, ten thousand slaughtered, the dead piled in heaps, the dying trampled under foot by horses, on every side the image of death and the throes of death. And that is the fruit of your peaceful institutions! Indignation and pity rise from the very bottom of my heart. Yes, heartless philosopher! come and read us your book on a field of battle!

A mob is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason, and traversing its work. The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its actions are insane like its whole constitution; it persecutes a principle; it would whip a right; it would tar and feather justice, by inflicting fire and outrage upon the houses and persons of those who have these.

With most crimes, police generally do not arrest suspects without a warrant unless they personally witness it. Yet the mob justice surrounding domestic violence has brought the innovation of mandatory arrest, even when it is not clear who has committed the deed or even that any deed has been committed at all. One prosecutor in Hamilton County, Ohio, notes that this is “turning law-abiding citizens into criminals.” Judith Mueller of the Women’s Center in Vienna, Virginia, who had lobbied for the mandatory arrest law, says, “I am stunned, quite frankly, because that was not the intention of the law. It was to protect people from predictable violent assaults, where a history occurred, and the victim was unable for whatever reason to press charges. . . . It’s disheartening to think that it could be used punitively and frivolously.

After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule is not because they are most likely to be in the right nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.

But orgies and womanly companionship were denied me. Not one friend. I saw myself in front of an angry mob, facing a firing squad, weeping incomprehensible sorrows and forgiving them, like Joan of Arc: “Priests, professors, masters: you falter bringing me to justice. I was never one of you; I was never Christian; my race sang upon the rack; I don’t understand your laws; I have no moral compass, I’m a beast: you falter …

Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like Negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?

South Carolina had thirteen lynchings last year, ten were charged with assault on white women, one with horse stealing and two with being impudent to white women. The first of the ten charged with rape, named John Peterson, was declared by the white woman in the case to be the wrong man, but the mob said a crime had been committed and somebody had to hang for it. So John Peterson, being the available ‘somebody,’ was hanged. At Columbia, South Carolina, July 30th, a similar charge was made, and three Negroes were hanged one after another because they said they wanted to be sure they got the right one.

The Irish recruits who poured into the army in 1846 were already accustomed to the realities of antebellum American nativism. The country had been rocked by anti-Catholic riots even before the famine produced new waves of Irish immigrants; in Boston, Protestant mobs had burned a convent in 1834, and Philadelphia had seen mob attacks on Irishmen ten years later. So the recent immigrants who enlisted for war with Mexico weren’t surprised to encounter nativists in the army. They were very much surprised, though, by the intensity of the anti-Irish sentiment they faced from their officers—a social sentiment that was expressed through official discipline.

A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work in itself is good in itself—for slaves, at least. This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery. I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think. A rich man who happens to be intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions, usually says something like this: "We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness. But don’t expect us to do anything about it. We are sorry fort you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange, of your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.” This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated people; one can read the substance if it in a hundred essays. Very few cultivated people have less than (say) four hundred pounds a year, and naturally they side with the rich, because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty. foreseeing some dismal Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are. Possibly he does not like his fellow-rich very much, but he supposes that even the vulgarest of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of people, than the poor, and that he had better stand by them. It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions. Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothings else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty? In my copy of Villon’s poems the editor has actually thought it necessary to explain the line “Ne pain ne voyent qu'aux fenestres” by a footnote; so remote is even hunger from the educated man’s experience. From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally. The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day’s liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. “Anything,” he thinks, “any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.

The next morning the newspapers carried the news that while our meeting was being held there had been staged in Paris, Texas, one of the most awful lynchings and burnings this country has ever witnessed. A Negro had been charged with ravishing and murdering a five-year-old girl. He had been arrested and imprisoned while preparations were made to burn him alive. The local papers issued bulletins detailing the preparations, the schoolchildren had been given a holiday to see a man burned alive, and the railroads ran excursions and brought people of the surrounding country to witness the event, which was in broad daylight with the authorities aiding and abetting this horror. The dispatches told in detail how he had been tortured with red-hot irons searing his flesh for hours before finally the flames were lit which put an end to his agony. They also told how the mob fought over the hot ashes for bones, buttons, and teeth for souvenirs.

Whatever our ex-president claims he thought might happen that day, whatever reaction he says he meant to produce, by that afternoon, he was watching the same live television as the rest of the world. A mob was assaulting the Capitol in his name. These criminals were carrying his banners, hanging his flags, and screaming their loyalty to him. It was obvious that only President Trump could end this. Former aides publicly begged him to do so. Loyal allies frantically called the administration. But the president did not act swiftly. He did not do his job. He didn’t take steps so federal law could be faithfully executed, and order restored. Instead, according to public reports, he watched television happily as the chaos unfolded. He kept pressing his scheme to overturn the election. Even after it was clear to any reasonable observer that Vice President Pence was in serious danger, even as the mob carrying Trump banners was beating cops and breaching perimeters, the president sent a further tweet attacking his vice president.… We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. It makes no difference whether the actors be many or one, a tyrant or a mob. A mob is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason and traversing its work. The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its actions are insane, like its whole constitution. It persecutes a principle; it would whip a right; it would tar and feather justice, by inflicting fire and outrage upon the houses and persons of those who have these. It resembles the prank of boys, who run with fire-engines to put out the ruddy aurora streaming to the stars. The inviolate spirit turns their spite against the wrongdoers. The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode; every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side. The minds of men are at last aroused; reason looks out and justifies her own and malice finds all her work in vain. It is the whipper who is whipped and the tyrant who is undone.

As a child, Callum never sympathized much with storybook villains, who were always clinging to some sort of broad, unspecified drive. It wasn’t the depravity that unnerved him, but the desperation of it all; the need, the compulsion, which always destroyed them in the end. That was the distasteful thing about villains, really. Not the manner in which they went about their business, which was certainly gruesome and morally corrupt, but the fact that they desired things so intensely. The heroes were always reluctant, always pushed into their roles, martyring themselves. Callum didn’t like that, either, but at least it made sense. Villains were far too proactive. Must they participate in the drudgery of it all for some interminable cause? Taking over the world was a mostly nonsensical agenda. Have control of these puppets, with their empty heads and their pitchforked mobs? Why? Wanting anything—beauty, love, omnipotence, absolution—was the natural flaw in being human, but the choice to waste away for anything made the whole indigestible. A waste. Simple choices were what registered to Callum as most honestly, the truest truths: fairy-tale peasants need money for dying child, accepts whatever consequence follow. The rest of the story—about rewards of choosing good or the ill-fated outcomes of desperation and vice—we’re always too lofty, a pretty but undeniable lie. Cosmic justice wasn’t real. Betrayal was all too common. For better or worse, people did not get what they deserved.

Now we all should seek to live a well adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. But there are some things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I call upon you to be maladjusted. I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to mob rule. I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic effects of the methods of physical violence and to tragic militarism. I call upon you to be maladjusted to such things. I call upon you to be as maladjusted as Amos who in the midst of the injustices of his day cried out in words that echo across the generation, 'Let judgment run down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.' As maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln who had the vision to see that this nation could not exist half slave and half free. As maladjusted as Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery could cry out, 'All men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.' As maladjusted as Jesus of Nazareth who dreamed a dream of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. God grant that we will be so maladjusted that we will be able to gout and change our world and our civilization. And then we will be able to move from the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to man to the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.

Each generation identifies with a small group of people said to have lived lives exemplifying the vices and virtues of that generation. If one were to choose a trial lawyer whose life reflected the unique characteristics of America’s “Wild West” of a criminal justice system in the latter half of the Twentieth Century, that person likely would be my father. New York City of the 1960s until the turn of the 21st century was the world’s epicenter of organized and white-collar crime. During those four decades, the most feared mafia chiefs, assassins, counterfeiters, Orthodox Jewish money launderers, defrocked politicians of every stripe, and Arab bankers arriving in the dead of night in their private jets, sought the counsel of one man: my father, Jimmy La Rossa. Once a Kennedy-era prosecutor, Brooklyn-born Jimmy La Rossa became one of the greatest criminal trial lawyers of his day. He was the one man who knew where all of the bodies were buried, and everyone knew it. It seemed incomprehensible that Jimmy would one day just disappear from New York. Forever. After stealing my dying father from New York Presbyterian Hospital to a waiting Medevac jet, the La Rossa Boys, as we became known, spent the next five years in a place where few would look for two diehard New Yorkers: a coastal town in the South Bay of Los Angeles, aptly named Manhattan Beach. While I cooked him his favorite Italian dishes and kept him alive using the most advanced medical equipment and drugs, my father and I documented our notorious and cinematic life together as equal parts biography and memoir. This is our story.

For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jet-like speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle names becomes “boy” (however old you are), and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

As a child, Callum never sympathized much with storybook villains, who were always clinging to some sort of broad, unspecified drive. It wasn’t the depravity that unnerved him, but the desperation of it all; the need, the compulsion, which always destroyed them in the end. That was the distasteful thing about villains, really. Not the manner in which they went about their business, which was certainly gruesome and morally corrupt, but the fact that they desired things so intensely. The heroes were always reluctant, always pushed into their roles, martyring themselves. Callum didn’t like that, either, but at least it made sense. Villains were far too proactive. Must they participate in the drudgery of it all for some interminable cause? Taking over the world was a mostly nonsensical agenda. Have control of these puppets, with their empty heads and their pitchforked mobs? Why? Wanting anything—beauty, love, omnipotence, absolution—was the natural flaw in being human, but the choice to waste away for anything made the whole indigestible. A waste. Simple choices were what registered to Callum as most honestly, the truest truths: fairy-tale peasants need money for dying child, accepts whatever consequence follow. The rest of the story—about rewards of choosing good or the ill-fated outcomes of desperation and vice—we’re always too lofty, a pretty but undeniable lie. Cosmic justice wasn’t real. Betrayal was all too common. For better or worse, people did not get what they deserved. Callum had always tended toward the assassins in the stories, the dutiful soldiers, those driven by personal reaction rather than on some larger moral cause. Perhaps it was a small role to serve on the whole, but at least it was rational, comprehensible beyond fatalistic. Take the huntsman who failed to kill Snow White, for example. An assassin acting on his own internal compass. Whether humanity as a whole won or lost as a result of his choice? Unimportant. He didn’t raise an army, didn’t fight for good, didn’t interfere much with the queen’s other evils. It wasn’t the whole world at stake; it was never about destiny. Callum admired that, the ability to take a moral stance and hold it. It was only about whether the huntsman could live with his decision—because however miserable or dull or uninspired, life was the only thing that mattered in the end. The truest truths: Mortal lifetimes were short, inconsequential. Convictions were death sentences. Money couldn’t buy happiness, but nothing could buy happiness, so at least money could buy everything else. In terms of finding satisfaction, all a person was capable of controlling was himself.

I took up the pestle as she left, and pounded and ground automatically, paying little heed to the results. The shut window blocked the sound both of the rain and the crowd below; the two blended in a soft, pattering susurrus of menace. Like any schoolchild, I had read Dickens. And earlier authors, as well, with their descriptions of the pitiless justice of these times, meted out to all illdoers, regardless of age or circumstance. But to read, from a cozy distance of one or two hundred years, accounts of child hangings and judicial mutilation, was a far different thing than to sit quietly pounding herbs a few feet above such an occurrence. Could I bring myself to interfere directly, if the sentence went against the boy? I moved to the window, carrying the mortar with me, and peered out. The crowd had increased, as merchants and housewives, attracted by the gathering, wandered down the High Street to investigate. Newcomers leaned close as the standees excitedly relayed the details, then merged into the body of the crowd, more faces turned expectantly to the door of the house. Looking down on the assembly, standing patiently in the drizzle awaiting a verdict, I suddenly had a vivid understanding of something. Like so many, I had heard, appalled, the reports that trickled out of postwar Germany; the stories of deportations and mass murder, of concentration camps and burnings. And like so many others had done, and would do, for years to come, I had asked myself, “How could the people have let it happen? They must have known, must have seen the trucks, the coming and going, the fences and smoke. How could they stand by and do nothing?” Well, now I knew. The stakes were not even life or death in this case. And Colum’s patronage would likely prevent any physical attack on me. But my hands grew clammy around the porcelain bowl as I thought of myself stepping out, alone and powerless, to confront that mob of solid and virtuous citizens, avid for the excitement of punishment and blood to alleviate the tedium of existence. People are gregarious by necessity. Since the days of the first cave dwellers, humans—hairless, weak, and helpless save for cunning—have survived by joining together in groups; knowing, as so many other edible creatures have found, that there is protection in numbers. And that knowledge, bred in the bone, is what lies behind mob rule. Because to step outside the group, let alone to stand against it, was for uncounted thousands of years death to the creature who dared it. To stand against a crowd would take something more than ordinary courage; something that went beyond human instinct. And I feared I did not have it, and fearing, was ashamed.

Riots, thievery, and homelessness set the rich against the poor. During a wildcat strike at Chicago’s Pullman factory, workers were ordered to accept a 20 percent wage cut. In response to the outcry that followed, William Howard Taft—later elected president and eventually named chief justice of the Supreme Court—wrote offhandedly to his wife: “It will be necessary for the military to kill some of the mob … enough to make an impression.”4 The press encouraged such callousness: the Chicago Tribune once urged homeowners pestered by tramps to spike handouts with “a little strychnine or arsenic” and poison men as if they were vermin.5

A mob is a mob whether made up of government officials acting under instructions from the Department of Justice, or of criminals, loafers and the vicious classes.

Civic sense without common sense leads to mob violence.

This is why feminists who were protesting against California’s gender self-identification laws – which had been exploited by a known sexual predator to expose himself to women and children at the Wi Spa in Los Angeles – were mobbed by groups calling themselves ‘Antifa’.

Too often, Black men are tried, convicted, and sentenced to long prison terms for the same crimes that white men commit with no legal consequences whatsoever. The pernicious racist and patriarchal fantasy of Black assault on “pure white womanhood,” a fantasy that incited lynch mobs in the past, still animates the public today. In those rare instances when a Black stranger attacks a white woman, the state spares no energy in hunting down and punishing the offender. But in reality most rapists are not strangers to their victims; they are acquaintances, bosses, dates, boyfriends, or husbands. Most men who rape white women in the United States are white. As we saw in Chapter 3, their odds of being caught or punished are close to nil.

Yet, Black women, in particular, suffer from the stigmatization of Black male sexuality, to which the injunction, "Believe women," too readily gives cover, just as Dalit women suffer specifically from the sexual stigmatization of Dalit men. When we are too quick to believe a white woman's accusation against a Black man, or a Brahmin woman's accusation against a Dalit man, it is Black and Dalit women who are rendered more vulnerable to sexual violence. Their ability to speak out against the violence they face from men of their race or caste is stifled, and their status as counterpart to the oversexed Black or Dalit male is entrenched. In that paradox of female sexuality, such women are rendered "unrapable" and thus "more rapeable". Ida B. Wells patiently documented the lynchings of Black men on trumped-up claims of raping white women. But she also recorded the many rapes of Black women that inspired no lynch mobs and at which little notice was taken. One such case was that of Maggie Reese, an 8-year-old girl raped by a white man in Nashville, Tennessee. The outrage upon helpless childhood needed no avenging in this case: she was Black.

I would like to believe that there is a resolution in the human tragedy and that order can be reimposed upon the earth in the same way it occurs in the fifth act of the Elizabethan drama that supposedly mirrors our lives. My experience has been otherwise. History seldom corrects itself in its own sequence, and when we mete out justice, we often do it in a fashion that perpetuates the evil of the transgressors and breathes new life into the descendants of Cain. I would like to believe the instincts of the mob can be exorcised from the species or genetically bred out of it. But there is no culture in the history of the world that has not lauded its warriors over its mystics. Sometimes in an idle moment, I try to recall the names of five slaves out of the whole sorry history of human bondage whose lives we celebrate. I have never had much success.

Sharia Justice [10w] Sharia justice is a lynch mob masquerading as Allah's will.

Nor should the Toryism of the defeated Loyalists be mistaken for statism or servility. Many had left the infant American Republic not because they were unthinking Royalists, but because they feared that mob rule would lead to socialism. As Daniel Bliss, a Massachusetts exile who later became chief justice of New Brunswick, put it, “Better to live under one tyrant a thousand miles away than a thousand tyrants one mile away.

One man who didn’t like mob action even on behalf of civil rights was Thurgood Marshall. A skilled lawyer, he was redeeming civil rights for blacks the American way—by bringing lawsuits, making arguments, and winning in court. Marshall was the anti-Rousseau, using words, not pictures, to get justice. Martin

The only purpose of government—as opposed to the state of nature—is to replace “might makes right” with a system of justice.

We’re here to execute a murderer,” Zil said, pointing at Hunter. “We are bringing justice in the name of all normals.” “There’s no justice without a trial,” Astrid said. Zil grinned. He spread his hands. “We had a trial, Astrid. And this chud scum was found guilty of murdering a normal. “The penalty,” he added, “is death.” Astrid turned to face the mob. “If you do this, you’ll never forgive yourselves.” “We’re hungry,” a voice cried, and was immediately echoed by others. “You’re going to murder a boy in a church?” Astrid demanded, pointing toward the church. “A church? In God’s house?” Zil could see that those words had an effect. There were some nervous looks. “You will never wash the stain of this off your hands,” Astrid cried. “If you do this, you will never be able to forget it. What do you think your parents would say?” “There are no parents in the FAYZ. No God, either,” Zil said. “There’s just humans trying to stay alive, and freaks taking everything for themselves.

Is there the right to free expression of opinion and of opposition and criticism of the Government of the day? Have the people the right to turn out a Government of which they disapprove, and are constitutional means provided by which they can make their will apparent? Are their courts of justice free from violence by the Executive and from threats of mob violence, and free of all association with particular political parties? Will these courts administer open and well-established laws which are associated in the human mind with the broad principles of decency and justice? Will there be fair play for poor as well as for rich, for private persons as well as Government officials? Will the rights of the individual, subject to his duties to the State, be maintained and asserted and exalted? Is the ordinary peasant or workman, who is earning a living by daily toil and trying to bring up a family, free from the fear that some grim police organisation under the control of a single Party like the Gestapo, started by the Nazi and Fascist

Started in Argentina, escrache has spread to other Latin American countries as a popular movement to oust, shame and ostracize retired generals, politicians and other powerful figures who have committed unpunished crimes. After locating the criminal in question, the organizers would inform his neighbors that here lives a state-sanctioned mass murderer or torturer, or a looter of public funds. Later, thousands of people would converge on this man's house to publicly indict the blood-drenched fat cat. Though this Latin American version of a Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush or Obama is never physically attacked, the monster will be shunned by many of his neighbors, with local businesses even refusing to sell him a meal or a newspaper. Critics of escrache have denounced it as a form of vigilante justice and, as the outburst of an angry mob, something that should be declared illegal, but the protesters are only reacting to acts that are themselves clearly illegal, not to mention outrageously immoral. The protesters' public harassment does not compare to their targets' torturing and/or raping, then throwing their victims from airplanes into the ocean, or kidnapping their children and erasing their identities. Too often, the state will use the legality argument to bind its opponents, while doing whatever it pleases, legal or not. Not satisfied with a monopoly on violence, the state also wants to be the sole interpreter of what's right and wrong, as implied by the often-bandied-about legality question, and the more criminal the state is, the more illegal, the more it will shriek about the need for everyone else to walk the straight and narrow, according to its own power-drunk markings. Talking to Borzutsky's class, I asked the students to consider escrache in the North American context. Who are our criminals in high places and what should we do about them? Unlike our southern neighbors, we have neither the clarity to identify our enemies from within, nor the courage or unity to confront them. To be fair, though, our top criminals don't move among us, with many never even being mentioned by our obfuscating media, as great a killer of brain cells as any, and worse than any glue. Even when not anonymous, however, the most malignant Americans are hidden behind guarded gates, bulletproof glass or acres of real estate, so that it would take considerable enterprise to target them. When faced with an illegal and ultraviolent enemy, we must resort to any and all tricks, be extra clever and strike hard, for real, but most of us are too tightly bound to our bifurcated harness to do more the jiggle, every once in a while, an electronic voting machine. Geez, I wonder who they'll let us pretend to vote for next time, if there's a next time?

Too often, when a defense attorney wins a case on constitutional grounds, it is offhandedly described in the press, and sometimes even by our society in general, as a “loophole.” This is always done so in the pejorative sense, as in, “That scumbag lawyer got his terrible criminal client off on a goddamned loophole. It’s a travesty of justice.” Unfortunately, this statement, this sentiment is completely ass-backward. When a defendant is convicted of a crime in spite of his or her constitutional protections, that is the loophole—that is the true travesty. Otherwise, why have a Constitution? Why don’t we just revert to mob rule, mob lynchings? Why is it so often accepted practice in the minds of some in this country that the police can break the law in their efforts to get the bad guy, as long as they get the bad guy? How silly is that, the police can break the law in order to arrest a person that broke the law? What?

A call to embrace democracy is the worst insult to a society that is still alien to civilisation. It is like being asked to dance to the tune of mob justice.

Language like that went down well. Hitler had laced his earlier speeches with more abstract topics like the relationship between national strength and international justice, but he soon found that was not the language the mobs wanted to hear. In

The class struggle had a just motive, and Socialism at the beginning was in the right. What has happened is that instead of pursuing its original path of seeking after social justice among men. Socialism has turned into a mere doctrine, and one of the chilliest frigidity, and it has no concern, great or small, for the liberation of working men. Karl Marx was a German Jew who sat in his study and watched, with horrible impassivity, the most dramatic happenings of his age. He was a German Jew who, with the British factories in Manchester before his eyes, and in the middle of formulating inexorable laws about the accumulation of capital, in the middle of formulating inexorable laws about production and about the interests of employers and workmen, was all the time writing letters to his friend Friedrich Engels, telling him the workers were a mob and a rabble, which need not be bothered with except in so far as they might serve to test out his doctrines.

I began to see that the pattern of American history was not a straight line of progress on race but rather an uneven and often painful process of progress followed by backlash. We hadn’t moved as a country from the Emancipation Proclamation to Martin Luther King Jr. to Barack Obama. Rather, the rights of Blacks to vote and hold office and own property were steadily eroded and erased after the end of Reconstruction, the bodies of Black men and women stayed effectively enslaved through convict leasing, and this apartheid system was upheld and enforced through terrorism, mob torture, and vigilante justice.3 Slavery had effectively continued in many parts of the country, under other names, even as America was liberating Europe during World War II.

the woke mob is just behaving the way any mob does. First it tars and feathers the enemy; then when the enemy’s supporters reveal themselves, it tars and feathers them too.

It makes no difference.” “Sure it does. That’s why we have a system of justice, so that vigilantes like you don’t irresponsibly call for mob violence against an innocent man.

From all this we can extrapolate three outstanding facts that are almost synecdoches of our increasingly clandestine world. 1.–The cocaine money laundered by Archbishop Marcinkus helped finance the death squads that killed Archbishop Romeros, who served the same God and the same church as Marcinkus: we are all living in a Le Carre novel. 2.–In the symbiosis between the Mafia and the CIA the mob thinks it is using the spooks, and the spooks think they are using the mob and one of them is terribly deceived. 3.–Bobby Kennedy broke off his affair with Marilyn when he learned, from FBI wiretaps, that the Mafia was taping his boudoir adventures. Contemplate that: while the Justice Department wiretaps the Mafia, the Mafia wiretaps the head of the Justice Department. It is more than a synecdoche; it is a Joycean epiphany.

To those who preach morals — I do not wish to promote any morality, but to those who do I give this advice: If you wish to deprive the best things and states of all honor and worth, then go on talking about them as you have been doing. Place them at the head of your morality and talk from morning to night of the happiness of virtue, the composure of the soul, of justice and immanent retribution The way you are going about it, all these good things will eventually have popularity and the clamor of the streets on their side; but at the same time all the gold that was on them will have been worn off by so much handling, and all the gold inside will have turned to lead Truly, you are masters of alchemy in reverse: the devaluation of what is most valuable. Why don’t you make the experiment of trying another prescription to keep from attaining the opposite of your goal as you have done hitherto? Deny these good things, withdraw the mob’s acclaim from them as well as their easy currency; make them once again concealed secrets of solitary souls; say that morality is something forbidden That way you might win over for these things the kind of people who alone matter: I mean those who are heroic. But to that end there has to be a quality that inspires fear and not, as hitherto, nausea Hasn’t the time come to say of morality what Master Eckhart said: “I ask God to rid me of God.

Odd thing, ain’t it . . . you meet people one at a time, they seem decent, they got brains that work, and then they get together and you hear the voice of the people. And it snarls.” “That’s mob rule!” “Oh, no, surely not,” said Vimes. “Call it democratic justice.” “One man, one rock,” Detritus volunteered.

What’s so scary is that mob rule has displaced due process. The faceless masses are America’s new arbiters of justice. I’m so fearful of the court of public opinion that I’ve stopped saying anything of value online, stopped unpacking what’s important in my life, stopped trying to forge any kind of understanding over social media.

Peace for the sake of peace is weakness. Weakness breeds cowardice. Cowardice breeds subconscious viciousness. Subconscious viciousness breeds hatred. Hatred breeds mobs. Mobs breed the chaos of no responsibility. No responsibility breeds mindless thugs fighting for scraps by any means necessary. Men who destroy mirrors because they fear their own reflections.” I nodded thoughtfully. “Thrasymachus. The ends justify the means. Might is right. Mob justice from men who are too scared to face and address their own flaws. They point a finger outwards rather than acknowledge the four pointing back at them.” Charon smirked, nodding. “This is the fruit born from the crop of weak men. Weak men make hard times. Hard times make strong men. Strong men make good times. Good times make weak men. Welcome to the carousel of life.

What’s so scary is that mob rule has displaced due process. The faceless masses are America’s new arbiters of justice.

When the mob stirred, a Justice should look for those who gained by its anger.

And what is more, since we are likely to be exchanged in a few days, I shall have a court-martial on top of it all.’ ‘Oh, as for that, sir,’ cried Jack, throwing himself back in his chair, ‘you cannot possibly have any misgivings – never was a clearer case of –’ ‘Don’t you be so sure, young man,’ said Captain Ferris. ‘Any court-martial is a perilous thing, whether you are in the right or the wrong – justice has nothing much to do with it. Remember poor Vincent of the Weymouth: remember Byng – shot for an error of judgment and for being unpopular with the mob. And think of the state of feeling in Gibraltar and at home just now – six ships of the line beaten off by three French, and one taken – a defeat, and the Hannibal taken.

Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in an Elevator.” In eight words a single newspaper established final say over truth and justice, law and order, life and death. The mob acted of its own volition, but the trusted voice of the daily paper incited the violence. No retraction could clear away the spilled blood. No editorial could change the fact that black America’s lone refuge, the Greenwood District, was now ash and dust.

the air is full of accusation and humiliation. We have seen this spirit most famously on the campuses, where students protest harshly, sometimes violently, views they wish to suppress. Social media is full of swarming political and ideological mobs. In an interesting departure from democratic tradition, [social justice revolutionaries] don’t try to win the other side over. They only condemn and attempt to silence.16

On the Birthday of Murtaza Bhutto My nephew drives on a route that crosses alongside 70 Clifton every day since I am in Karachi. It reminds me that I was then a working journalist. I visited the last 70 Clifton in 1977, the resident of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, later, Benazir Bhutto, and then Murtaza Bhutto and Fatima Bhutto during the driving towards Karachi Press Club; I asked my nephew to stop near 70 Clifton so that we can click a few pics of it. Today is Murtaza Bhutto's Birthday, and he became the victim of armed evil and murder. I stood outside 70 Clifton, remembering inside the conversations, discussions, and delightful atmosphere in the Bhutto era. I felt sadness and pain, imagining that time when pleasure, joy, and mob walked around it, but today it was dead-quiet and displayed sadness on its walls; the Birthday existed; however, the figure held that day was not there, and his daughter far away from Pakistan in exile-life, though the justice has failed, not the God.

[Paul] is the kind of man you want on your side in a debate but who may just alienate more sensitive souls. He confronts the magistrates at Philippi; he is itching to speak to the vast crowd in Ephesus; he tries to explain himself to the Jerusalem mob that had been trying to lynch him; he rebukes the high priest. He knows how to turn the factions in the Sanhedrin against one another. He lectures the Roman governor himself about justice, self-control, and the coming judgment. He tells the ship owner where he should and shouldn’t spend the winter, and then says, “I told you so” when it all goes horribly wrong. He spots the sailors who are trying to bolt and tells the centurion to stop them. As a companion, he must have been exhilarating when things were going well and exasperating when they weren’t. As an opponent, he could cause some people to contemplate murder as their only recourse.

passage of the Stamp Act, a tax meant to defray the costs incurred during the French and Indian War. The day the act was to take effect, November 1, 1765, a group of angry New Yorkers headed down Broadway to Fort George, torches in hand, to demand justice. While acting governor Cadwallader Colden hid in the fort with the stamps, the mob hoisted an effigy of Colden on the gallows. Then they tore down the fence surrounding the Bowling Green, lit a bonfire, and burned Colden’s valuable winter sleighs. Six

passage of the Stamp Act, a tax meant to defray the costs incurred during the French and Indian War. The day the act was to take effect, November 1, 1765, a group of angry New Yorkers headed down Broadway to Fort George, torches in hand, to demand justice. While acting governor Cadwallader Colden hid in the fort with the stamps, the mob hoisted an effigy of Colden on the gallows. Then they tore down the fence surrounding the Bowling Green, lit a bonfire, and burned Colden’s valuable winter sleighs. Six months later, the Stamp Act was repealed. While the Sons of Liberty continued to jeer at all signs of British authority, the Loyalist citizens of New York, such as the DeLanceys, raised the cash to erect a gilded equestrian statue of George III to stand on the very spot in Bowling Green where the mob had rallied. In August 1770, the new gold statue of King George was unveiled by the Loyalists to great acclaim.

The expression on Blackraven's face showed unfathomable confusion, and he had opened his mouth when Jayden called over, "You didn't know, Raven? These three were the assassins I told you about. That's kind of funny. Did we really never get around to telling you who they were?" "Are you serious? These were the three guys I told you about! You know, the players I had employed when that mob griefed my shop?" "No kidding? You know Blackraven?" asked Jayden. "No," said Stan, irony dripping from his voice. "We ran over to greet him because he's a complete and total stranger." Jayden scowled.

when I sat, I was alone when I stood, I was a group when I walked, I turned into a mob when I spoke, I changed into a mass and when I raised my voice, I transformed into a movement

The charges of ‘white privilege’ or ‘rape apologist’ are thrown around only because we no longer accuse people of being witches or communists when we wish to destroy them.

On the Birthday of Murtaza Bhutto My nephew drives on a route that crosses alongside 70 Clifton every day since I am in Karachi. It reminds me that when I was a working journalist. I visited the last 70 Clifton in 1977, the resident of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Later, Benazir Bhutto and then Murtaza Bhutto and Fatima Bhutto, during the driving towards Karachi Press Club, I asked my nephew to stop near 70 Clifton, so that we can click a few pics of it. Today is Murtaza Bhutto's Birthday, who became the victim of armed-evil and murdered. I stood outside 70 Clifton, remembering inside the conversations, discussions, and delightful atmosphere, in the Bhutto era. I felt sadness and pain, imagining that time when pleasure, joy, and mob walked around it, but today it was dead-quiet and displayed sadness on its walls, the Birthday existed; however, the figure held that day was not there, and his daughter far away from Pakistan, in exile-life, though, the justice has failed but not the God.

I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country, the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions in lieu of the sober judgment of the courts, and the worse than savage mobs for the executive ministers of justice. This disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit it, it would be a violation of truth and an insult to our intelligence to deny. Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the every-day news of the times. They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana; they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former, nor the burning sun of the latter.

It makes no difference.” “Sure it does. That’s why we have a system of justice, so that vigilantes like you don’t irresponsibly call for mob violence against an innocent man.” “Whoa, no one said anything about mob violence.” “Sure you did. Own it already. You want my client, a father of three with no record, in prison right now. No trial, nothing. Come on, Rick Chad, let your inner fascist out.” Hester banged the desk, startling Prepster Host, and began to chant: “Lock him up, lock him up.

But the centerpiece of his proposal was the creation of a state police force. Local jurisdictions, he declared, had long since proved that they would not or could not mete out justice to mob members.

There is no place for weapons in civilized revolution.

If you still have your trigger finger And your punching fists Your township mob justice Your mothers with whistles Your seven-month self-defence course If you remember your second-year Anatomy course Particularly the Stab wound lecture Bring them all. Use them now

What’s so scary is that mob rule has displaced due process. The faceless masses are America’s new arbiters of justice. I’m so fearful of the court of public opinion that I’ve stopped saying anything of value online, stopped unpacking what’s important in my life, stopped trying to forge any kind of understanding over social media. I mostly post shots of my pets and complain about the weather. It’s edgy stuff.

Someone will do something. An authority will take care of this. The law and the courts, maybe even the social media mob will grant you justice. In our feminized society, a consensus will be reached bestowing upon you some reward as the victim. These are all pleas. Everyone pleads to someone else for justice. The piece of paper may signal the system agreed, but you have to look in the mirror and believe it. When you assigned the power over to the authority to give you justice, you relinquished the right to declare something justice. It is their justice, not yours.

Wells was incensed. “This is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was,” she wrote. She noted “that the Southerner had never gotten over this resentment that the Negro was no longer his plaything, his servant, and his source of income” and said that whites were using charges of rape against black business owners to mask this resentment. The lynching of Moss, she wrote, was “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘keep the nigger down.’”59 White mobs destroyed Wells’s newspaper, Free Speech, which railed against white vigilante violence, the inadequate black schools, segregation, discrimination, and a corrupt legal system that denied justice to blacks. Wells was forced to flee the city, becoming, as she wrote, “an exile from home for hinting at the truth.

Here’s the problem: The future isn’t made up of predetermined, structured data alone. It changes as a result of people, and what we are learning, breaking, achieving, feeling, saying, thinking, and building in the present. Algorithms can’t account for the introduction of new qualitative variables, such as hardheaded CEOs, temperamental developers, or the eruption of mob justice within online communities.

All those years I spent trying to bring the men that murdered Roosevelt Haynes to justice, and turns out my daddy wasn’t Roosevelt but the leader of the lynch mob. How’s that for irony?

Why isn't it justified to resort to violence in the course of justice? It's because if you resort to violence for your conviction of humanity, then nothing stops the inhumans to resort to violence for their conviction. Hence nothing changes. We must change the very notion that it is okay to resort to violence if we want to change the society. What's need is a desire for reform founded entirely on the premise of peace.

Violence cannot be revolution. Either you can have violence or you can have revolution.

Nearly four thousand African Americans were lynched in the United States between 1877 and 1950. Most of the victims were not accused of any crime before they were sentenced to mob justice for offenses usually of a dubious nature, such as “seeking employment in a restaurant,” “using offensive language,” and “trying to act like a white man.

When a mob in Valdosta, Georgia, in 1918 failed to find Sidney Johnson, accused of murdering his boss, Hampton Smith, they decided to lynch another black man, Haynes Turner, who was known to dislike Smith. Turner’s wife, Mary, who was eight months pregnant, protested vehemently and vowed to seek justice for her husband’s lynching. The sheriff, in turn, arrested her and then gave her up to the mob. In the presence of a crowd that included women and children, Mary Turner was “stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a white man opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground and was stomped to death.”[2]

Do you want justice or revenge ? because revenge does not stop the pain . It cause one. It does not close the wound. It opens a new one.

To Buchanan, what others described as taxation to advance social justice or the common good was nothing more than a modern version of mob attempts to take by force what the takers had no moral right to: the fruits of another person’s efforts. In his mind, to protect wealth was to protect the individual against a form of legally sanctioned gangsterism.

I don't even notice the mob until it's rushing toward me. They snort and pant, ash-colored jackets swirling as their arms and legs pull at the air. A few hundred of them stampede in my direction, and there’s no way to escape. I’m convinced that I’m about to be swept away. I’ll kick, I’ll struggle, but their momentum will be too much for me. They’ll carry me to justice. No escape this time. But the mob reaches me and keeps moving. They’re heading somewhere, and I just got in their way. I stop fighting, and move in the same direction as everyone else, and soon the crowd shelters me, buries me inside its raucousness.