The Founding Fathers wanted the American people to live under the rule of law, not of men. The left seeks the opposite. It advances arbitrary government under the guise of “equity,” which results in a tyranny that treats the innocent as guilty and the guilty as innocent.

After the jurors delivered their verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, Kamala Harris ominously said, “I’ve spent a majority of my career working to make our criminal justice system more equitable. It’s clear, there’s still a lot more work to do.” In other words, Rittenhouse should have been subject to a trial not by law but by mob politics. Joe Biden, of course, agrees. He let it be known that he supports those who feel “angry” about the verdict.

The facts in the case clearly don’t matter to the left. Its view of “equity” has nothing to do with justice. “Equity” is simply a euphemism for an endless and ubiquitous project of race-based social engineering that justifies new injustices in the name of eliminating old ones. The crudest forms of reverse racism thus fall under “equity.” It is the exact opposite of equal treatment before the law. It subjects the politically favored to one standard and the politically disfavored to another.

The goal of Kamala Harris is not to make the criminal justice system more equitable but more ideologically partial.  Hence, she can blithely disregard the facts pointing to Rittenhouse’s innocence, while supporting the release of Black Lives Matter rioters from jail.

Americans should feel a chill whenever they hear talk of “equity,” as it signals the loss of their rights according to the ideological whims of the left and its scheme to reorder society. Woe to those who don’t fit into that scheme.

The politicians who speak the loudest against “systemic racism” are in fact proposing a new form of it, one that is as baldly unjust as any previous system of racism. The left’s systemic racism treats the Kyle Rittenhouses as automatically guilty and authorizes all manner of discrimination for the sake of achieving its ideological goals. Out of this new racism come pointless race wars that pit those who didn’t commit the injustices of slavery and segregation against those who didn’t suffer them.

For Kamala Harris, “equity” is an instrument of historical revenge and societal leveling. “Equity” cannot coexist with equality, freedom, and justice, since those principles stand in the way of that leveling. Recall her lecture on the “difference between equality and equity”:

Equality suggests, “oh everyone should get the same amount.” The problem with that, not everybody’s starting out from the same place. So if we’re all getting the same amount, but you started out back there and I started out over here, we could get the same amount, but you’re still going to be that far back behind me. It’s about giving people the resources and the support they need, so that everyone can be on equal footing, and then compete on equal footing. Equitable treatment means we all end up in the same place.

Applied to the criminal justice system, this thinking means that verdicts should be meted out not according to the guilt or innocence of the defendant but according to the government’s view of what will produce a properly reordered society. “Equity” means treating defendants not as individuals but as bearers of historical sin or beneficiaries of historical wrongs.

This project is completely unrealizable and totalitarian, and it means the death of individual rights. Rittenhouse was caught up in the left’s ugly ideological power grab and barely escaped its grasp. Others will not escape it.

As the left sees it, Lady Justice should not be blind but biased. She should operate like a Bolshevik commissar, throwing cases for guilty darlings of the ruling class while exacting grand historical punishments against the haplessly innocent.

We now hear the left saying that the right of self-defense is a product of “white supremacy.” This is critical race theory at its most demented. If the left gets its way, trial by “equity” politics will become the norm. What the Founding Fathers feared is coming to pass — a government of corrupt men who stomp on the rule of law and turn the criminal justice system into an extension of their tyranny.