Crime is the new redistribution

Everyone notices it now. Crime in many American cities is crippling. Yet majorities of registered voters in those same cities continue to vote for officials who will only make it worse. We saw that most recently in Chicago, Illinois. After Lori Lightfoot lost her primary, voters elected a worse mayor – possibly the worst mayor they’ve elected so far. Understand: the voters deserve more criticism than does the new mayor who proposes to govern a major city without police. That can have only one explanation: the voters do not care about crime. Or rather: crime is the new method of redistribution of wealth, and revenge against their putative oppressors. This could set up a Donnybrook that will make the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre look like a neighborhood boys’ tussle in which no adult need have meddled.

What’s happening in Chicago

The site Liberty Airwaves quotes a February 23 article by WTVO-TV Channel 17 (ABC), Rockford, Illinois. They in turn quote this report naming Chicago the murder capital of the United States.

Chicago’s 697 criminal homicides in 2022 were the most in the nation for the 11th-straight year. Philadelphia suffered the 2nd-most with 516. New York City (438), Houston (435) and Los Angeles (382) rounded out the top 5. By contrast, cities with the fewest homicides out of the 75 surveyed were Plano, TX and Gilbert, AZ. They suffered 1 and 3 murders, respectively.

New Orleans’ 2022 homicide rate of 74.3 homicides per 100,000 residents was the nation’s highest of the 75 cities surveyed. Rounding out the top 5 were St. Louis (68.2), Baltimore (58.1), Detroit (48.9) and Memphis (45.9). By comparison the nationwide homicide rate was 6.5 per 100,000 in 2020 (the most recent reliable national rate).

Wirepoints, the report’s authors, said the safest cities and towns are west of the Mississippi. Houston stands out as the exception – but Houston has leftist politics almost as bad as that of Chicago. But more than that, the safe places are away from the coasts. What’s so special about areas in the Western interior? Lack of gun control, that’s what. When people can defend themselves, crime takes a dip. More guns, less crime, as John R. Lott, Jr. repeats to anyone who will listen.

A thoroughly bad election choice

So what did Chicago voters do? As mentioned, they ousted Lori Lightfoot, who turns out simply to have run out of friends with an abrasive manner. Then then elected Brandon Johnson, who thinks as Lori Lightfoot thinks, and worse. Police are the enemy to him, and he wants them gone. In fact Johnson actually wants to send therapists and social workers as emergency first responders. He also believes there’s nothing wrong with the city’s budget that a big tax increase won’t fix.

Dick Morris yesterday said that anti-crime candidates were losing elections for mayor, prosecuting attorney, and so forth. He highlighted (or “lowlighted”) Chicago as a booby-prize example.

Nor is Chicago the only example. Consider New York, where Alvin Bragg, the unworthy successor to Robert Morgenthau as New York County District Attorney, also lets violent and property crime rise. One outraged mother chastised him publicly after he declined to prosecute the alleged murderer of her son. This is of course the same Alvin Bragg who weaponized his office against the biggest national anti-crime candidate, Donald Trump. That case will merely go down in history as a political blunder. His softness on crime in his city is much, much worse.

But again, as bad as his policies are, that outraged mother’s fellow voters voted him in. Why would they do a thing like that?

Does crime no longer matter?

Here is one likely answer: to inner-city voters, crime is something that happens to someone else. Worse, crime is something that those to whom it happens, deserve to have happen to them. A thief is an irregular wealth-redistribution agent. Examine closely the broader platform of any “pro-crime” officeholder, to paraphrase Morris. You will find redistribution of wealth, in one form or another, at the heart of their political program. So why prosecute an activity, i.e. crime, that accomplishes the long-term goal?

That applies particularly to theft, both petty and grand. It applies especially to the smash-and-grab shoplifting that is driving major retailers out of American cities. San Francisco, recall, lost its flagship Whole Foods Market. Likewise, Chicago is losing four of its Wal-Mart outlets. Between shoplifting and the lost of honest business, the stores are losing money. Simple as.

Activists demanded that the stores stay open anyway – but have no regard for the dangers of running a store in the neighborhoods involved. But worse – over the weekend, Chicago descended into anarchy. Large crowds, mostly teen-agers, are running riot in the streets.

And Mayor-elect Johnson refuses to condemn the teen-agers. He’s not brazen enough (yet) to condone such violence. But he excuses it by saying the teen-agers are “starved of opportunity.” But don’t voters understand that law and order are prerequisite for such opportunity? After all, they elected this avowed follower of Karl Marx.

What about murder?

One can almost understand, though one must loathe, the spectacle of widespread theft. After all, one can actually subsist (for awhile) on selling stolen goods or spending stolen money. But murder? How does that avail anyone?

We’re not talking here about one middle- or upper-class person murdering another to secure an inheritance, ensure silence, or for any of the favorite motives that shows like Perry Mason or Columbo used to highlight in the last century. Sometimes we’re talking about robbery leading to murder. “Dead men tell no tales,” and “if he’d just turned over his cash,…” But most of the time we see murder from sheer spite. “I don’t like you. Bang! You’re dead!” (Or maybe not necessarily “bang.”)

Time was when society took murder more seriously than any other crime. The maximum crime rated the maximum penalty. So the rot set in when States began abolishing the death penalty. What we see now is worse – prosecutors won’t prosecute crime, even murder. This goes beyond “a would-be dictator is a menace to us all, and a $130,000 hush money payment is as good a thing as any to send him up the river for.” We see the excusing of murder for the sake of excusing it.

No doubt a certain bald-headed engineer of German extraction regards a murderer as an irregular population thinner. That doesn’t explain electing a pro-crime prosecuting attorney. Whoever votes for such a person, likely regards murder as justifiable revenge.

Where will these crime waves lead?

Dick Morris seems to believe that one day, even the “progressive” left will realize that so much crime makes a world unsafe even for them. True enough, a certain kind of crime enjoyed a toleration that ultimately led to a bloody excess that in turn led to a crackdown. And that excess happened in Chicago.

In 1929, two gangs of bootleggers divided Chicago between them. Everyone should remember their leaders: “Scarface” Al Capone and George “Bugs” Moran. Tensions grew between them, until at last each leader conceived the notion that the other wanted to kill him. This set off several rounds of assassinations – but the people of Chicago didn’t care. As long as they could visit the speak-easies, where “prohibited” liquor flowed, a few deaths here and there didn’t matter to them.

But on February 14, 1929, gunfire broke out inside a garage at 2122 North Clark Street in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. According to one popularized version, one young woman entered the garage, saw a pile of bloody bodies, and ran screaming from the building.

As may be, someone called police. And so began the investigation of the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, and the public outcry that turned the tide against organized crime everywhere.

Not so simple

But that’s not where we’re likely headed. Instead we’ve hit the tipping point, at which people of good heart flee the cities. This applies equally to residents and business operators.

Anarchy will become the rule, and rival militias might form among those who still remain, for whatever reason. But even if another Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre occurs, nobody will care. People like the young woman who might or might not have run screaming from that garage on Clark Street won’t even still be living there. Instead they’ll have moved out to “the sticks,” “the boondocks,” whatever one wishes to call the rural areas. They will have formed that Parallel Economy that will render the present cities unnecessary.

The crunch will come when those cities collapse totally, and those who brought that collapse about, range out from them, looking for prey. Then and only then will the cycle stop.