As a conservative, I’m a big fan of the federalist system, under which each of the various states serves as a “little laboratory” for testing various ways of living and self-governing. In a country as large and a people as varied as ours, “one size fits all” usually doesn’t fit very many.
For example, some states have high tax rates, many regulations, strong public unions and near-mandatory public schools. Most of the people who vote for and run those states believe that people need protection from businesses and each other, and that higher living standards are primarily caused by wise central planning, and that an elite group of experts can make better choices for common people than they can be trusted to make for themselves.
Other states choose the opposite course: lower taxes, less regulation, “right to work” rules that allow unionizing but not coercion by unions, and more flexible educational options (charter or magnet schools, private and/or religious schools, homeschooling) for parents. People in those states believe that they can make most of their own decisions, and that elites are generally sufferers of CRIS (cranial-rectal inversion syndrome), and should mind their own business.
You can recognize, with admittedly a little over-simplification, the former states as blue states and the latter as red states. Over the last 50 years – and accelerating markedly over the last 10-15 years – the results of each groups’ laboratory experiments have become clear. The three biggest red states (FL, TX and TN) are improving on most economic and educational fronts, and the three biggest blue states (CA, NY, IL) are deteriorating.
The easiest way to judge the success of the two competing systems is to watch population movement. People have voted with their feet, moving from blue to red states; CA, IL and NY each lost a congressional seat – and FL, TX and TN each gained one – after the last census.
And there were wallets attached to all of those feet. Which is why the biggest blue states have lost millions of financially productive citizens to the red states, with FL, TX and TN gaining tens of billions in taxable income in the last couple of years, and CA, NY and IL losing similar amounts.
In other words the “little laboratories” in the red states are clean spaces filled with people coming up with technical advances and innovative new products, services and ideas.
The laboratories in blue states are alternatively exploding, collapsing, or on fire, and the people staggering out of them have dazed expressions, soot-blackened faces and singed clothes and hair.
Nowhere has the divergence of these two governing visions been more stark than in the area of crime and punishment. Generally speaking, leftists have seen crime as the result of large, impersonal social forces – capitalism, racism, toxic masculinity, Donald Trump – more than the individual, moral choices of people. Conversely, conservatives acknowledge that humanity (and thus human systems) are deeply flawed, but insist that criminals are responsible for choosing to commit crimes.
The two philosophies produce wildly different punishment strategies. Progressives generally go easier on criminals, offering them cashless bail, a plethora of diversion/counseling/probation options, shorter sentences and no death penalty. Conservatives are the opposite.
Conservatives favor “three strikes and you’re out” sentences. (And a foul ball counts as a strike.) Liberals favor “forty-seven strikes and we think you may have a problem” sentences.
If you kill someone in many blue states, the judges and justice systems agonize over how society has failed you. If you kill someone in Texas or Florida, we kill you back.
I’ve written a lot of “stupid criminal” stories in previous columns, and those usually have satisfying endings. A thug breaks into a house and takes the living-room temperature challenge when the homeowner exercises her second amendment rights. A would-be car jacker takes the asphalt temperature challenge when he tries to car-jack the wrong person. A brainiac trying to steal a catalytic converter from under a car fails the “can you set up a jack that won’t fall?” challenge. (The first paramedic to arrive thinks, “We would have started chest compressions, but his chest was plenty compressed already.”)
Most of these stories take place in red states, where there is social encouragement for those who fight back against crime and criminals. Those that happen in blue states or cities often end badly for the non-criminal.
When Austin Simon attacked an elderly bodega worker in NYC, the old man stabbed him in self-defense. When Simon died – turns out he had a long criminal record and was out on parole after assaulting a cop (UNEXPECTEDLY!) – leftist jackass DA Alvin Bragg charged the old guy with murder. (Only a huge public outcry forced him to drop the charges.)
Similarly, heroic Marine Daniel Penny choked out a violent recidivist criminal who was threatening citizens on the NYC subway, and when the perp died, Penny was charged with murder and had his life ruined. In Tim A-WOLz’s Minnesota, career criminal and woman-beating junkie George Floyd became a secular saint when a cop was accused of being too rough with him while he was in the midst of fatally overdosing.
And you can’t even trust that criminals who are appropriately convicted and sentenced in blue states will stay in prison, where they belong. Consider the case of California pedophile Charles Mix, whose mugshot should be entitled, “Satan Needs a Haircut.”
This waste of oxygen was 47 and living with a family in 2003 when he stole a car, kidnapped their five-year-old girl and spent 12 hours molesting and taking pictures of her before he was caught. Even in CA, he was convicted and sentenced to 350 years to life in prison. Which means that – by my rough, English-professor math – he could possibly be released when he’s 397 years old.
Of course to conservatives like me, that’s not punishment enough. We hear this and ask questions such as “Have we forgotten how to hang people by the neck until they’re dead?” or “Are all of our firing squad rifles broken?” Or “Can anybody run down to the library and grab a book on the Middle Ages, so we can brush up on that ‘drawing-and-quartering’ process?”
But he did his child raping in a blue state, so he gets the benefit of progressive jurisprudence. “Well, at least he’s going to die in prison,” you are saying to yourself.
But you haven’t been paying attention. Because now he’s up for parole.
I would engage my Sam Kinison filter, but that many F-bombs in all caps are not fit for a classy, family-friendly column like this one.
It seems that in 2014 CA began a warm-hearted policy called the “Elderly Parole Program,” wherein prisoners over 60 – no wait, they dropped that age to 50 in 2021! – can be paroled after serving 20 years, no matter how long their original sentence was.
I’m not making that up. The leftists who run CA think we should be compassionate to pedophiles and murderers if they are elderly 50-somethings!
Let that sink in. I’m a fine figure of a man (“and handsome too” – obscure Elvis Costello reference, check) and I like to think I’m not THAT far past the height of my powers. And that evil creep is only 6 years older than me! It’s a horrific defect in leftist thinking – and outrageously mis-placed compassion – that could allow someone like that to walk free.
The same thing is happening on a societal level all over the world. The progressive sympathy for illegal immigrants over law abiding citizens explains the sanctuary city madness, and the accompanying crime waves. This week police sources in NYC reported that 75% of those arrested in Manhattan are illegals.
Meanwhile in Germany, the number of gang rapes has exploded, and the German government – in good, progressive fashion – is trying to suppress inconvenient truths about the perpetrators. When two parliamentarians – described as “right-wing populists,” naturally – got some government data, it turned out that out of 155 identified suspected rapists, 84 were “auslanders” (foreigners), while 71 were German citizens.
It’s bad enough that over half of your nation’s rapists were imported, but the entire truth is even worse. Because when the “right wingers” checked records of the 71 “citizens’” first names, they found a whole lot of “Muhammeds,” “Bilals,” and “Ibrahims.”
When those names were factored in, a German newspaper concluded that “78% of all suspects [likely] had a migration background.”
The left’s ideas about crime – what causes it, and what to do about it – have borne a bitter fruit. The women of Germany (and throughout Europe), the residents of American sanctuary cities, and our country in general has paid a high price for those failed ideas.
Having said all that, I’ve got a lot of friends and colleagues who are lefties and/or vote Democrat, and most of them are good people, with good intentions. But that is cold comfort, since their intentions don’t change the results of their policies.
I’m reminded of a quote from the great Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, murdered by the Nazis just a month before WWII ended. It’s a little long, but I think it’s worth quoting in its entirety, because it sums up our dilemma in this election, IMHO:
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed… For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than a malicious one.”
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 