Five recent crimes and what they say about Western society.
No society with such inverted values can long survive.

I’ve never read the book, though it is held to be one of the great novels, but after one of the crimes that’s made the global news this week, perhaps I should, given the similarities:

Crime and Punishment follows the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished ex-student in Saint Petersburg who plans to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker, an old woman who stores money and valuable objects in her flat. He theorises that with the money he could liberate himself from poverty and go on to perform great deeds, and seeks to convince himself that certain crimes are justifiable if they are committed in order to remove obstacles to the higher goals of “extraordinary” men. 

Luigi Mangione and Brian Thompson

The crime I’m thinking of is, of course, Luigi Mangione‘s hit-job killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City last week, and the parallels are less with the motivations of the killers – Mangione seems insane to me – than that American society, especially the Left, had a Raskolnikov moment with regard to American health care insurers and the “noble vigilante” who had taken them on:

Parts of the Global Left joined in, like The Bloated Bolshevik here in NZ with “Hear me out, assassinating CEOs might not be a bad idea”, and his commentariat chimed in just like the US social media accounts described above.

I liked reporter Charles Cooks response to these arguments:

There you are, hurtling through the start of the sentence, making all the right points, saying all the necessary things, conveying all that needs to be conveyed, and then, Bam!, out comes that pesky coordinating conjunction that ruins the exercise in an instant…
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There’s a word for this sort of argument in the expansive English language. That word is “justification.”

It would seem “that certain crimes are justifiable if they are committed in order to remove obstacles to the higher goals” of the Left – like getting rid of health insurance, for-profit healthcare, and replacing it with 100% state-owned healthcare.

And perhaps beyond healthcare…

Daniel Penney and Jordan Neely

Then there’s a good news crime story, in the sense that an injustice did not occur:

In a victory for justice in America, the Daniel Penny jury has made their decision, and they found him not guilty of negligent homicide in the death of Jordan Neely. Penny is a free man.

Yet even this good news left a sour taste. Firstly because the trial should never have happened, contrasting strongly with DA Bragg’s notorious light touch on violent crimes in NYC (although fitting perfectly with his pursuit of Trump), and even to the end with the judge in the case allowing a highly dubious maneuver by the prosecution when the jury deadlocked on the primary charge of second-degree manslaughter, instructing the jury to move to the second charge of negligent homicide.

Secondly because of the Left’s treatment of this “vigilante” in the wake of the verdict:

  • The Media Tries to Gin Up 2020 Again. Check out the headlines and leads:
    • Jury Acquits Man Who Was Choking Rider on Subway (NYT)
    • Not guilty of homicide in choking homeless man (WSJ)
    • Veteran who used chokehold on subway rider acquitted (AP)

      Hardly any different to the activist group Democracy Now who screamed out, Jordan Neely’s Killer Walks Free.
  • The 2020 Agit-Prop groups turn up again:
    • BLM 1: “These wonderful white people..…God damn them and God Damn America!”.
    • BLM 2: “We need some Black vigilantes. People want to jump up and choke us and kill us for being loud? How about we do the same when they attempt to oppress us?”
    • NACCAP: “The acquittal of Daniel Penny in the death of Jordan Neely has effectively given license for vigilante justice to be waged on the Black community without consequence.”
  • The Rather Inconvenient Points Daniel Penny’s Critics Leave Out:
    It was a multi-racial jury; Black and Hispanic witnesses testified to how terrified they were of Neely, with some thanking Penny for his actions; a Black man and a Hispanic man helped Penny subdue Neely.

The NAACP comment got a brutal Community Note on the X platform, listing the multi-racial aspects of the whole case. As Libs of TikTok noted, this meant that “BLM hoaxes won’t work anymore on X!”, and that appeared to be the case in the streets as well (where Antifa were also surprisingly missing in action), which means the BLM era may be dead:

“The further we get from Floydapalooza and its ideological pathogens of DEI, BLM, and defund the police, the more the race-hustlers are on defense. The public knows that BLM’s claims about ‘white supremacy’ and ‘systemic racism’ are hateful lies.” In this sense, time is on our side…for now…. “Race Marxists care a lot more about hating white people than they do about helping blacks, and they’re always looking for a new excuse to whip up that hatred.”

True, and while the public seem to have wised up since 2020 it will take longer to work through the system to get rid of the likes of DA’s like Bragg who deliberately treat victims like criminals, which – like the 2020 George I-stick-this-gun-in-your-pregnant-belly Floyd events – turns out to be widespread across the West:

The American Tourist and the African Migrant

An American citizen could face ten years in German prison for stabbing an African migrant who sexually assaulted her in a train station. The migrant grabbed the unnamed 20-year-old woman’s buttocks, she pulled out a knife, he grabbed her arm, and she wound up stabbing him in the heart, leading to his death, according to the German newspaper Junge Freiheit. German prosecutors in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate have brought charges against her. Prosecutors don’t believe she meant to kill the man, but still don’t believe it was within the bounds of self-defense.

What sort of injuries would she have needed to suffer before they would accept her response being within the bounds of self-defense? What’s a reasonable state of mind that fits within those bounds when she is very likely well aware that in 2015, more than 1,000 women were sexually assaulted by migrants at a New Year’s Eve celebration in Germany?

Perhaps if she’d somehow managed to just put a chokehold on him, even if he later died, the German prosecutors would be acting differently?

Michael Byrd and Ashli Babbitt

This four year old story just won’t go away, probably because it contravenes decades of Leftist screaming about “killer cops” who are too fast on the trigger. In the case of U.S. Capitol Police captain Michael Byrd the Left were ecstatic about what he did, and grateful:

[T]he USCP, the Metropolitan D.C. P.D., the FBI, and the DOJ had all cleared Byrd of any wrongdoing.  They cleared him..[].. without interviewing the eyewitnesses... [T]he USCP promoted Byrd to Captain after the shooting and provided him with any number of perks.  These included an unrestricted $36,000 bonus as part of a retention agreement in August 2021 [others got $3000] and assistance in setting up a GoFundMe that raised over $164,000….a year before the shooting, the Circuit Court for Prince George’s County slapped Byrd with a $56,000 federal tax lien.  The case remains open.

Funnily enough I’d read of Byrd some years ago when he made the news by leaving his Glock pistol behind on a toilet. But that was not an unusual mistake for him:

Byrd had a career-long record of reckless behavior.  He shot at a stolen vehicle, got cited for “conduct unbecoming an officer” after a racial confrontation, left his service weapon unattended in a public bathroom, later failed a routine background check for a shotgun purchase, and then failed the USCP shotgun training course.

This from 2001 is a doozy:

“So they charge him with eating, drinking on post, abandoning post….They charge him with untruthful statements with the recommendation to terminate.” Even with the evidence and firing recommendation, Capitol Police administration did not part ways with Byrd.
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Byrd not only had serious financial issues, but he was on the USCP’s “Lewis List,” which is for officers with significant issues of integrity and credibility who can not be relied upon in criminal trials.

In short, an incompetent, shady police officer who should have only served behind a desk and never on the frontline because his judgement in critical situations had been proved poor over many years. It’s therefore no surprise to find that with Babbitt (who actually had military police experience) he violated just about every police directive on using deadly force:

Masked and out of uniform, Byrd did not identify himself as a police officer, did not give Babbitt verbal orders to stop, and did not give her a chance to comply.  He did not “diligently assess” the situation before firing. He never considered any other defensive tactics or compliance techniques. He disregarded the presence of seven other police officers in his line of fire. Most critically, Babbitt did not pose “an imminent danger of death or serious injury.”

He also panicked in his radio calls, talking about “shooting” in such a way that it sounded like others had been shooting, which went across the radio nets fast as you can imagine. Watching the multiple videos of the shooting at the time (like the witnesses these were also ignored by the Capitol Police review) I’d wondered about his failure to yell out something like “Police. Stop or a I will shoot” or something similar.

This is now a civil lawsuit for wrongful death so there may eventually be some justice for Babbit, but Bryd knows how to play the game that will keep his name good in public and the MSM has helped him, not only implying that he faces threats because of his race (rather than his actions), but that he was also, as he says, the victim of a “lethal insurrection” in which he “…saved countless lives”.

The Little Girl and Walmart

Finally there’s this crime, a crime which was minor, resulted in no intervention, and which will receive no punishment.

Her parents turned up about 45 minutes later and whisked her away.

But this isn’t just some kind of parenting problem, it’s a social one. We tell children to be their true selves, then let those true selves be absolutely the worst selves any person could be. And we praise them for it, we make excuses for them. The thing is, at their core, kids don’t want to be let loose to be disasters. They want structure so that they have some guidelines on how to exist. We’ve relativised everything, even the most egregious behavior. And the irony is, it helps no one. Not the children, who are screaming for structure in a world bent on permissiveness, and not the adults who have to live with the aftereffects of that permissiveness. 

And what happens as such children become adults? Nothing good:

They will project their feelings of being lost and aimless onto America, and seek to exert power over others despite never having seen it modeled by anyone, including the people who love them. Instead of smashing bottles of sparkling juice, they will smash statues, art, and anything else, secure in the knowledge that there will always be an Amber (or more likely, a court-appointed lawyer) to snap at those who seek to hold them accountable, “Don’t yell at them; you don’t know what they’ve been through.” What they’ve been through, however, is being handed the right to exert power without having earned the wisdom to wield it.

In each of these cases, the criminal-victim aspect has been inverted for political and ideological reasons.

Luigi Mangione and Michael Byrd are heroes because they killed people the Left see as enemies of the cause and the little Walmart girl is already a victim of… something.

Daniel Penney and the unnamed American woman are criminals because they defended themselves and others against people the Left use as martyrs to the cause.

No society with such inverted values can long survive.