Portrait of an Angry Black Racist

Portrait of an Angry Black Racist
The life and times of Elie Mystal.
By Discover The Networks

In an appearance this week on CNN, The Nation’s “senior justice correspondent,” Elie Mystal, said he believed that Republican policies generally appeal to the most detestable elements in American society – an assertion reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s famous “basket of deplorables” reference in 2016. “This has been their party for a long time,” Mystal explained. “At some point Republicans need to look to themselves, look at the kinds of policies they’re promoting, look at the way they want the country to be and ask why do our policies attract the worst people possible? Like they have to ask that question at some point to move forward from what has happened to their party.”

Mystal’s remarks, however, betray his utterly pathetic inability to understand that his own policies and his own worldview – as promoted and popularized by the Democratic Party — constitute the real political magnets for “the worst people possible.” That is, people who are perpetually angry, aggrieved, resentful, jealous, contemptuous, self-absorbed, and ungrateful.

Mystal’s Background

Born in Haiti in 1978, Mystal earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science and Government from Harvard University in 2000, and a Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School three years later. After working briefly as an Associate for the New York-based international law firm of Debevoise and Plimpton, Mystal quit the legal profession in 2008 to become an editor and “online provocateur” for the left-wing website Above the Law. Ten years later he joined The Nation, where he continues to write.

Mystal’s Contempt for Black Conservatives

On May 6, 2013, Mystal said of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas: “What’s really happening is that Thomas continues to think that people hate him because he’s a black conservative, when really people hate him because he’s a black a**hole.”

Claiming a Correlation Between the Second Amendment & Racism

In a November 2013 column titled “Is The Second Amendment Racist?,” Mystal stated that “it’s clear that widespread gun ownership helped white plantation owners keep control of their slaves”; that “the right to bear arms was certainly useful when it came time to ‘settle’ additional territory away from the people who were already living there”; and that “gun rights, who has them, and who does not, are inextricably tied to our history of racial oppression.” “It’s unsurprising, but still interesting,” he added, “that having a gun in your home is highly correlative with thinking that black people don’t share your values and are violent. People don’t buy guns to protect themselves from their neighbors and friends, they buy guns to protect themselves from somebody else.”

Arguing in Favor of Jury Nullification

On December 7, 2016, Mystal published an opinion piece arguing in favor of jury nullification – i.e., a jury’s refusal to follow the law and convict even an obviously guilty defendant – as a means of undermining America’s allegedly racist criminal-justice system. Some excerpts:

– “African-Americans live in a world where the police can murder us and get away with it. There is no justice for black people. And yet violently revolting against the system will get us nowhere. Maybe it’s time for black people to use the same tool white people have been using to defy a system they do not consent to: jury nullification. Black people lucky enough to get on a jury could use that power to acquit any person charged with a crime against white men and white male institutions. It’s not about the race of the defendant, but if the alleged victim is a white guy, or his bank, or his position, or his authority: we could acquit. Assault? Acquit. Burglary? Acquit. Insider trading? Acquit.”

– “I WANT CHAOS IN THE PROSECUTOR’S OFFICE. And you can’t accomplish that with a bomb or a gun. But you can with an acquittal. Lots of acquittals. All the acquittals. There are counties in this country where the justice system would grind to a halt if prosecutors couldn’t find black and brown people willing to convict or indict. The stench of it will choke the system until it is willing to change.”

– “Imagine if black people weren’t willing to indict a citizen for punching a white guy in the mouth? White people would lose their s**t, that’s what would happen. It’s time for us to push back. Civil disobedience, when used in a targeted fashion, is a powerful force.”

Accusing White People of Supporting Racist Police Officers

In late May 2020 – shortly after the infamous death of George Floyd in Minneapolis – Mystal wrote:

“The police are never going to voluntarily stop killing black and brown people. The killings will continue until the majority of white people in this country make the killings stop.

“The police work for white people, and they know it. White people know it too. Deep down, white people know exactly whom the police are supposed to protect and serve, and they damn well know it’s not black and brown people. A majority of [whites] clearly want the cops to behave this way. They want the viciousness. They want the horror. They know that having racist police officers around gives them incredible power, and power makes people feel good, even if they never use it.”

Opposing Abortion Restrictions in Mississippi

In a December 1, 2021 appearance on MSNBC’s The ReidOut,” hosted by Joy Reid, Mystal reacted to the Supreme Court’s oral arguments vis-à-vis a Mississippi law that banned abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Said Mystal:

“I can prove that a fetus is not deserving of full personhood rights because if it were, [conservatives] would be arguing that the fetus should be given citizenship. They would be arguing that the fetus should have other rights like a right to education, a right to health care. They would be arguing that I should be able to claim fetuses as dependents on my taxes, which you’ll note, they’re not. They’re only concerned about the right of a fetus when that right can be used to diminish the rights of women.”

Mystal’s Book Deprecating the Constitution

On March 1, 2022, Mystal released a New York Times bestseller titled Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution. In the first lines of the introduction to his book, he writes: “Our Constitution is not good. It is a document designed to create a society of enduring white male dominancy, hastily edited in the margins to allow for what basic political rights white men could be convinced to share.” Several times in his book, he writes that the Constitution is a “violent piece of shit.”

Mystal also attacks liberals who have some measure of respect for the Constitution:

– “[You] rarely see liberals make the point that the Constitution is actually trash. Conservatives are out here acting like the Constitution was etched by divine flame upon stone tablets, when in reality it was scrawled out over a sweaty summer by people making deals with actual monsters who were trying to protect their rights to rape the humans they held in bondage. Why would I give a fuck about the original public meaning of the words written by those men?”

– “Redeeming our failed Constitution from its bigoted and sexist sins does not require new amendments. It does not require a few new ornaments upon its crooked boughs. It requires the emerging majority in this country to reject the conservative interpretation of what the Constitution says and adopt a morally defensible view of what our country means. I’m here to tell you that the Constitution is trash.”

Mystal again derided the Constitution during a March 25, 2022 interview on the We’ve Got Issues podcast hosted by Joshua Holland. Among Mystal’s remarks were the following:

– “We are talking about a document that was written by slavers just straight up. The largest slave owner at the time of the Revolution was George Washington. So not your average everyday neighborhood slavers. We are talking about the captains of the slaving industry, you are talking about colonists, and you are talking about some rich white men who were abolitionists but were willing to make deals with slavers and colonists. No people of color had a say in how the Constitution was written. No women had a say in how the Constitution was written. So the idea that this literal 18th Century slave document represents the best we can do as a society is laughable to me.”

Mystal Advocates Packing the Supreme Court with Democrat Leftists

In a March 2022 interview with Salon magazine, Mystal called for the Supreme Court to be dramatically expanded with the addition of numerous Democrat leftists, so that American jurisprudence would not shift away from the Left, which had dominated it for so long:

“It’s court expansion or bust. As long as you have six conservative justices, you get nothing on voting rights, you get nothing on gun rights, you get nothing on climate change, you get nothing on police brutality, you get nothing on health care, you get nothing. So you expand the court and take your chances there, or you resign yourself to getting nothing. And people will say, ‘Oh, well, if we expand the court, Republicans will just expand it right back.’ So what? How is that worse than where we are now? I would argue that if we expand the court, it makes it harder for Republicans to expand it back because it makes it harder for Republicans to control all of government, because when everybody votes, Republicans lose.”

In the same vein, Mystal in June 2022 exhorted Democrats to “flood the court” (the Supreme Court) with 20 additional justices.

Depicting America’s Founding Fathers As “Racist, Misogynist Jerkfaces”

On May 2, 2022, Politico reported that an unidentified individual had leaked an initial draft majority opinion, written by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, in which the Court had decided to strike down the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. The following night on MSNBC, Mystal told Joy Reid: “Alito’s fundamental reasoning is that abortion is not a fundamental right because it doesn’t go back to the Founding, because the Founding Fathers didn’t recognize abortion as a fundamental right. He’s right about that. The Founding Fathers didn’t recognize abortion as a fundamental right because the Founding Fathers were racist, misogynist jerkfaces who didn’t believe that women had any rights at all. So, of course, they didn’t believe that women had rights to their own bodies.”

Elie Mystal: A “Jerkface” Personified

The bottom line is this: Elie Mystal detests pretty much everything about the United States – its founders, its history, its Constitution, its people, its laws, and its cultural traditions. And he clearly loves to articulate that hatred to anyone who will listen. Indeed, Mystal’s countenance beams unmistakably with smug satisfaction whenever he appears on television to remind white Americans that they are nothing more than a pack of racist bastards utterly unworthy of even the barest shred of his respect. And yet, this self-identified embodiment of permanent victimhood has somehow managed, at age 44, to compile a net worth of approximately $20 million – placing him, in terms of his wealth, in the top one-one millionth of 1 percent of all the human beings who have ever lived on Earth. Poor Elie Mystal. It must pain him terribly, to be constantly surrounded by so many privileged racists who cannot possibly understand the hell he is forced to endure day after day.

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