On September 15th, Deena Zaru of ABC News reported a rarity: a rapper wants to extend an olive branch to the president.
Rapper Meek Mill, who attended the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Annual Legislative Conference last week, expressed to ABC News that he is interested in meeting with President Trump to discuss criminal justice reform. And he doesn’t care how much flack he’d get from the media and other lefties for wanting to pow-wow with the hated Trump. “I come from North Philly, and I know people 10 times worse ... than Donald Trump. I talk to them and I deal with them. Of course, I'm always willing to step in and make change.”
Such openness is refreshing; Eminem would do well to take a page out of Meek Mill’s book. But what about criminal justice reform? What would he tell POTUS? Meek Mill’s conception of criminal justice for drug offenders involves decriminalizing marijuana entirely.
Why? Because, according to the rapper, “they’ve got laws and statutes in place that keep people in prison, basically over things that [are] legal nowadays.” So instead of treating criminal justice reform as one matter and drug abuse as another, Meek Mill not-so-meekly declared that simply enforcing drug law makes skewed justice. This is an article of faith among hard-left Democrats. Actress-turned-New York gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon recently proclaimed the decriminalization of marijuana an “issue of racial justice,” a quote that got her an accolade from rapper T.I.
ABC News won’t be receiving our accolades for balanced reporting anytime soon, as Zaru wrote that Meek Mill’s 2 to 4 year sentence in return for breaking his probation on a 2008 gun and drug case “reinvigorated a national debate on mass incarceration.” That may have spawned #FreeMeekMill, but doesn’t “reinvigoration” of a debate require that both sides to an argument contribute more energetically?
Drug policy is probably far more complex than most people give it credit for. The left, however, will frame it in the flashiest fashion possible, even if that comes at the expense of reason.
