When It’s Innocents vs. Evil, Progressives Abandon Innocents

“The kind of people who talk about the root causes of crime never include leniency.” - Thomas Sowell

Though eager to turn the page from one year to the next, we imperil ourselves and our children if we disregard a singular lesson from the old year. Namely, that there are a great many people who would happily see families, neighborhoods and entire cities thoroughly wrecked in service to some platitudinous twaddle hatched in a faculty lounge the day before yesterday, and that can't survive 15 minutes’ exposure to reality.

Consider the spoken and unspoken ideological lunacy of one Jamaal Bowman, former congressman from New York, who got his knickers in a twist when Daniel Penny was acquitted of criminally negligent homicide in the death of Jordan Neely, an apparently deranged violent man with 42 prior arrests who was threatening to kill passengers on a New York City subway.

“Dear White People,” Bowman wrote, evidently from the depths of his non-racist heart, “I don’t know why I feel the need to keep talking to you [Neither do we]. I don’t know why part of me still has hope for you and for us,” he added before concluding that, “Some of you are too far gone. But maybe enough of you aren’t and will join us in fighting to end white supremacy.”

Jamaal Bowman’s spoken words indicate that when a black man threatens to kill innocent passengers confined in a moving subway car, white passengers must not intervene to defend anyone of any race lest they be found guilty of white supremacy by Jamaal Bowman. Mr. Bowman’s racial code of conduct carries an unspoken message that ironically speaks the loudest. Because he would rather see horrified passengers on that subway car attacked, injured or even murdered than to see the attacker engaged and subdued by a man who Jamaal Bowman identifies as a racist on the basis of — you guessed it — his race. Mr. Bowman reminds me of Bill Buckley’s comment on Eleanor Roosevelt to the effect that following Mrs. Roosevelt in search of irrationality was like following a lit fuse in search of an explosion — you never had to wait long.

Years ago, G. Gordon Liddy described a liberal as someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man; a debt he proposes to pay with your money. Today, Jamaal Bowman and other progressives feel a great deal of sympathy for violent criminals and predators; sympathy which they demonstrate by allowing them to prey on you and your family.

Think I’m kidding? Look at my home stomping ground down in Louisiana where a French Quarter New Year’s terrorist attack, which authorities suspect involved multiple people, killed 10 and injured upwards of 35 people. The attack involved several Improvised Explosive Devices (IED), one of which was found near the iconic St. Louis Cathedral. Remember 2023 when President Biden identified “the single most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland?” He could have spotlighted foreign gangs who've been assaulting and killing American citizens on American soil, or even our homegrown moronic goons who slaughter innocent people in their own neighborhoods and communities with stupefying abandon, or for that matter, any of the nefarious foreign terrorist plots about which FBI Director Christopher Wray talks about in congressional hearings. But no, none of those things pierced the considerable fog of Joe Biden’s consciousness like the deadly threat posed by — you guessed it — White Supremacy.

As Greg Gutfeld might say, there’s an opportunity cost here. Because while the feds were busy infiltrating American Catholic Churches, hoping to find white supremacists in the local Knights of Columbus chapter or that nefarious little contingent of parishioners kneeling in prayer next to an abortion clinic, they missed the real threats. They labeled as “domestic terrorist” those impudent parents who had the gall to question local school boards about why their children were being assigned pornographic reading material, all while the actual terrorists were developing deadly plans for Americans on American soil. Thus do they spend vast amounts of your earnings to ignore your safety.

But I’m not done yet. Because in Atlanta, one Anthony George Battle assaulted and killed his wife, only to later murder a correctional officer in a federal penitentiary. Why? Because he felt “bossed around.” Meanwhile, Suellen Roberts and her 12-year-old daughter were on vacation at the Grand Canyon when Ms. Roberts was murdered in front of her daughter by a Thomas Sanders—who then took the daughter down to Louisiana, where he shot her several times before slitting her throat. In a Chicago suburb, Jorge Avila-Torrez sexually assaulted and then stabbed two girls, ages 8 and 9, who had been riding their bicycles. Four years later, he would go on to strangle Navy officer Amanda Snell in her Arlington, VA barracks. Then there was the time that a drug dealer named Kaboni Savage ordered the firebombing of a witness’s home in Philadelphia, resulting in 12 deaths, three of them children.

What do all of these killers have in common? Two things: First, they and 33 other monsters were found guilty and sentenced to death by the studied and sober reflection of a federal jury of their peers. Second, they, and 33 other monsters, had the death penalty commuted by Joe Biden in blatant disregard of the legal process, the deliberation of 37 federal juries, and the wounds that Biden’s pardons would inflict on the victims’ families.

See a trend here? If it’s a question of your safety or that of your family and community vs. the predator’s voracious appetite for innocent blood and plunder, Joe Biden, Jamaal Bowman, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, all their progressive allies and their little acolytes in the legacy media will turn their backs on you in a cocaine heartbeat. They defunded the police and posted bail for thugs who burned down mom-and-pop stores and police precincts and set fire to government buildings. For years these progressives stood down while stores were looted, cops were assassinated, monuments were defiled, and citizens were attacked and murdered in the street, so long as the race of the attackers and victims matched the race-assigned color code of “oppressed” vs. “oppressor” and “undocumented migrant” vs. law-abiding citizen. And they used your earnings and tax dollars to fund the carnage.

Here’s another pro tip: They don’t give a fig about the minorities whose votes they most covet. As Economist Thomas Sowell observed:

Does anyone seriously believe that excuse-making and counterproductive policies on crime are a favor to black communities? It is now so widely known and so well documented that black people are the main victims of black criminals that there is no room for honest misunderstanding on this subject?

Or as I might observe: Black Lives Matter doesn’t give one damn about black lives. In a recent interview, Manhattan Institute Fellow Heather Mac Donald observed:

I’ve never been to a police community meeting in a high crime area where I do not hear the good law abiding residents who show up to these meetings, beg for more police protection, they want more police activity. They want the police to do precisely the things that the ACLU says is racist. They want the police to get the drug dealers off the corners. They want them to get the kids that are fighting by the hundreds on corners off the streets.

In South Bronx, somebody said, “They’re hanging there like birds, whatever happened to loitering laws, whatever happened to truancy laws.” I heard somebody complain about smelling weed in his hallway. So they want the cops to crack down on marijuana smoking, because those people that live in high crime neighborhoods understand that street disorder, public disorder is the seed bed for more serious forms of violence like knifings and shootings.

And they also understand that public is an end in itself. I’ve never heard people say, “We want less police.” I’ve always heard them say, “We want more police.”

Having incentivized the pillaging and destruction of neighborhoods and cities, progressive governments have left people to fend for themselves when it comes to personal safety. Then, when someone steps up and defends innocent lives, he or she is attacked by the same people who will let a violent criminal walk free. We’ve seen it on the border, in our streets, and even in the progressive’s foreign policy which befriends America’s enemies while castigating our allies. We would be well served to never again cast a vote for those who favor the predator over the law-abiding.