There are two engines of oppression in this country, and they are not the same thing, even though they get conflated constantly. The first is classism. The second is racism. Both are real. Both cause measurable harm. And the most effective trick the people at the top pull is convincing poor white people they have more in common with rich white people than with poor people of color.
It is not subtle once you see it. Wealthy people made the conversation about race instead of class on purpose, because as long as working-class white people are focused on their racial alignment with the wealthy, they will never combine forces with the people who share their actual economic reality. A multiracial working class that recognized its shared interests would be the most powerful political force in this country. The people currently in power cannot afford for that to happen.
So a significant portion of working-class white people aim their frustration not at the system failing them, but at people of color being failed by that same system more severely; because racism compounds classism in ways class alone does not. They have been taught that their struggle comes from the people below them on the ladder rather than from the ones at the top pulling the levers.
It was engineered this way. The crack laws were engineered that way. The Southern Strategy was engineered that way. The culture war is engineered that way.
Here is what it looks like this past week.
Tyler Boebert, the 21-year-old son of Colorado Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, was arrested August 9 on five felony counts. Three for sexual exploitation of a child: inducement, possession with intent to distribute, and possession of sexually exploitative video. And two for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The charges stem from a 2024 incident. Investigators say the case began with a report about an Instagram account circulating explicit videos of teenagers, one of which allegedly involved Tyler and a 17-year-old girl. His bond was set at $10,000. He posted it the same day and went home. He is due back in court August 19.
This is not his first felony case. In February 2024, he was arrested on 22 counts tied to vehicle break-ins and property theft, including multiple felonies. He pleaded guilty to one count of attempted identity theft. Everything else went away.
I have a criminal history. I am not going to detail it here, but I will say that the times I had a private attorney, I walked. The times I had a public defender, I was looking at years, and always did time. Same me. Similar circumstances. Different resources. Completely different outcomes. I have also paid more than $10,000 in bail on charges significantly less serious than five felony counts of child exploitation.
The difference between someone who posts bond and sleeps in his own bed that night and someone who sits in county waiting on a trial they cannot afford to fight is not the seriousness of what they did. It is access to money. Plain and simple.
Lauren Boebert's statement said she loves her son and prays "for everyone affected during this challenging time." This is the same Lauren Boebert who has described herself as one of the most influential accounts spreading the groomer narrative online, who publicly vowed to post about groomers even more, who has called drag performers pedophiles, who told Pride-goers to stay away from children, and who built a political brand on the claim that queer people are a specific and urgent threat to children.
I have written about projection before. This is what it looks like. The people who fight hardest against a thing are very often the most personally entangled with it.
I do not identify as a Democrat. I am not writing this as a partisan piece. I am writing it as someone who sees a difference in how the two parties behave when one of their own gets caught, and who thinks that difference is worth calling out.
Both parties have documented cases. I could list them, and someone arguing the opposite could list theirs, which is exactly why trading names goes nowhere. And that's actually what they like us to stay busy doing. No court-verified database counts partisan convictions for child sex crimes side by side. What does exist is peer-reviewed research finding that Republicans are significantly less likely than Democrats to penalize their own candidates facing sexual misconduct allegations. How a party responds when one of its own gets caught is measurable in a way individual cases are not. That is the difference worth naming. Not who has the worse guy, because both of them do. What happens to him afterward.
Here is what the federal record actually says.
According to the United States Sentencing Commission, 55% of people convicted of federal sexual abuse offenses are white, and 65% of those convicted of producing child pornography are white. In 2024, 177,679 identified perpetrators of child abuse in this country were white, compared to 85,809 Hispanic and 85,474 Black.
Now look at what happens at sentencing. A peer-reviewed study in the journal "Sexual Abuse," analyzing federal data from 2006 to 2017, found that sentences for Black people convicted of sexual abuse rose 1,330% over that period. Sentences for white people convicted of the same offenses fell 8.66%. The Sentencing Commission's own data shows Black male defendants are 21.2% less likely than white male defendants to receive a downward departure, and serve sentences 7.9% longer for comparable offenses.
Then there is the question of who can afford a defense. Research from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and Ohio State consistently shows that defendants with private attorneys receive shorter sentences and lower conviction rates. This is not because public defenders are bad lawyers. It is because a public defender carries 300 cases and a private attorney carries 20 to 50. One has time to find the holes in the prosecution's case, and the other does not.
In 1986, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, establishing a 100-to-one sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. Five grams of crack, a few rocks, carried a mandatory five-year federal sentence. You needed to possess 500 grams of powder for the same minimum. There was no scientific basis for the distinction. The drugs are pharmacologically nearly identical.
Joe Biden co-authored that bill. He helped craft the 1988 Act that strengthened mandatory minimums further. And in 1994, as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he authored the crime bill that established three strikes, funded prison construction, and paid states to adopt tougher sentencing. He admitted it himself in a 2008 hearing: he drafted the legislation, and he was, in his words, "part of the problem."
He was a huge part of it. That is true, and it should be noted. It is also true that Reagan signed it and a bipartisan coalition championed it, many of them knowing exactly what it would do and calling it tough on crime anyway. By 1990, the average federal drug sentence for Black defendants was 49% higher than for white defendants, up from 11% four years earlier, before the Act took effect.
John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy chief, laid out the strategy in a 1994 interview: associate hippies with marijuana and Black communities with heroin, criminalize both heavily, and you can raid homes, arrest leaders, break up meetings, and vilify both groups on the evening news every night. Asked whether they knew they were lying about the drugs, he said, "Of course we did."
Eighty-one percent of people convicted of federal crack offenses between 2015 and 2019 were Black. The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 cut the disparity from 100-to-one to 18-to-one. It did not eliminate it.
The crack laws did not target wealthy drug users. They targeted poor ones. And because of the documented disparities in who gets policed, charged, and sentenced, they landed hardest on Black communities. The same system that lets a congresswoman's son post $10,000 and go home on five felony child exploitation charges sent Black men to federal prison for five years over a few rocks. That is not two different problems. That is one system with a designed hierarchy of whose freedom matters.
Now look at the other end of it. Bureau of Justice Statistics data shows white-collar offenders receive shorter average sentences and are less likely to be incarcerated at all. Roughly 23 months on average. In one documented federal study, judges said they considered a one-year sentence for a middle or upper-class professional more punitive than three or four years for a street criminal, because the social consequences of incarceration fall harder on people with more to lose.
To be very clear. The system explicitly discounts punishment for the people who have further to fall.
The John Jay College study found allegations against 4,392 Catholic priests in the United States between 1950 and 2002; 4% of the entire American priesthood. More than 92,000 people filed child sex abuse claims against the Boy Scouts of America, which established a $2.46 billion settlement fund in 2024. Teachers were the perpetrators in over 63% of child sex abuse cases that occurred in schools.
These are the institutions that have spent the last several years telling the rest of us who is dangerous to children. The law was never blind. It was aimed, and the people doing the aiming have always found ways to make sure it does not land on them.
So name it clearly. Hold it together with everything else you are watching. This is not a story about one family, it is a story about who the machine was built to catch.
Support the organizations doing the legal and policy work: the Brennan Center, the Equal Justice Initiative, the ACLU's racial justice project, and the groups pushing to end cash bail and reform sentencing. And refuse to accept the framing that what you are watching is justice. It is a system. And systems get changed by people who refuse to stop saying what they are.
