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Samuel Mangold-Lenett Op-ed: Under Our Civil Rights Regime, Fake Murders Are Punished and Real Murders Aren’t Worth Mentioning


BY: SAMUEL MANGOLD-LENETT | SEPTEMBER 19, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/09/19/under-our-civil-rights-regime-fake-murders-are-punished-and-real-murders-arent-worth-mentioning/

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“Yeah, hit his -ss,” a black teenager giddily said before his friend mowed down a cyclist in a recently circulated viral video.

“Ready?” the teenager driving what was reported to be a stolen car asked as he geared up to hit the cyclist, Andreas Probst, a 64-year-old retired police chief. A retired police chief, out on a morning bike ride, is apparently murdered by a nonwhite teenager, and the corporate media are silent. There are no protesters outside the killer’s house. There are no social media campaigns for accountability. Fortune 500 companies will not honor the legacy of Andreas Probst, despite his contributions to society.

As anyone with a functioning brain could tell you after watching the video, the hit-and-run was intentional. Thankfully, local police agree. The 17-year-old driver of the car whose name remains unreleased is expected to have his charges “updated to include open murder,” according to The Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Maybe this unnamed teenager will face justice and be locked away for the rest of his natural life, but what are the odds of an anti-social homicidal maniac actually being held accountable for his actions these days? I’m not optimistic, and that’s only part of the issue at hand.

On May 25, 2020, video surfaced of a white Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, with his knee on the back of a large black man, George Floyd, after the latter reportedly attempted to use a counterfeit bill in a convenience store. Floyd’s increasingly erratic behavior after being approached by the police led to Chauvin using a standard practice restraint to keep him from causing harm to himself and others. While restrained, Floyd would expire. It would later be revealed that he had a “fatal level” of fentanyl in his system during these events, but this didn’t matter. Nor did his aggressive and erratic behavior prior to being restrained on the ground.

The footage with which nearly everyone is familiar was void of context necessary to develop a proper understanding of the incident. It only shows a white man in uniform using his authority to push a yelling black man into the street. All the world saw was a black man repeatedly calling for his “mama” while saying he couldn’t breathe before he died. Chaos subsequently erupted in the streets, likely compounded by pent-up Covid-era frustrations, and the narrative makers ran with it.

Institutional media, corporate America, academia, and the political class enthusiastically insisted Floyd’s death was caused by white supremacy and systemic racism while race rioters and anarchists wreaked havoc on the general populace for several consecutive months. Dozens were killed, more than a billion dollars in property damage occurred, and virtually every major institution from Silicon Valley to Sesame Street pledged fealty to Black Lives Matter.

Because one man died in a highly publicized and drastically mischaracterized event, the country’s civic pantheon was cast aside: Eternal truth and natural law gave way to racial grievance and intersectional hierarchy. The “1619 Project” became our foundational myth, anti-racism our national religion.

Floyd’s death fundamentally changed the nature of our republic. Probst’s death will soon be forgotten.

The Civil Rights Regime

The deafening silence from institutional media and the overwhelming majority of the American government following the killing of Probst is a consequence of the civil rights regime. It’s the creation and dehumanizing of outgroups and the overlooking of in-group members’ maliciousness. It is an integral part of American government and culture.

Fulfilling the promises of the Declaration of Independence and ensuring equality for all American citizens before the law was a noble and righteous goal. This may have been where these intentions began, but it is certainly not where the exercise has ended.

The legal system has been generationally warped through decades of affirmative action and disparate impact laws creating new social hierarchies. Every identitarian denomination seeks representation within this coalition, hoping to partake in the spoils and gain social capital. Odds are they will be able to. The only ones not allowed within the gate are those who benefited from the old hierarchies or those whose worldviews challenge the premise of the new ones.

This is why any time trans activists, race grifters, anarchists, or any other leftist ideological group stages an “insurrection,” by left-wing standards, the media whitewash it. The chaos engulfing the nation during the summer of 2020 reinforced a hierarchy the civil rights regime has a vested interest in maintaining, so it was allowed to continue. Jan. 6, however, challenged the new hierarchy so its participants must never again be allowed to see the light of day.

Where Americans initially saw an opportunity to correct historical wrongs, cynical activists saw a spoils system and new cultural ethos to exploit edging out anyone else who couldn’t sufficiently claim the legal or cultural status of “victim.” 

Recall this past May when Daniel Penny (white) restrained Jordan Neely (black), a dangerous schizophrenic and violent, repeat criminal, on the New York City subway system after the latter repeatedly menaced passengers. Neely would later be pronounced dead at a New York hospital after the incident.

Whereas Neely allegedly shouted about how he would “hurt anyone on this train,” and Penny likely prevented him from doing just that (as any able-bodied man ought to do in a healthy society), this didn’t stop leftists in legacy media and the government from lavishing praise upon the former while condemning the latter as an evil racist murderer. After all, Neely sometimes dressed up as Michael Jackson, and Penny is a white guy who said, “Hey, stop that.”

[READ: The Lesson Of Jordan Neely: Your Courage And Sacrifice Will Be Punished]

Following this, America dusted off the 2020 playbook, corporations bent the knee, politicians raised their fists, protesters flooded the streets — you get the picture.

Penny’s whiteness was placed at the very center of what we were assured was a violent attack motivated by racial animus. He was a white man killing a black man because that’s what white men do, so the narrative goes, and is currently facing second-degree manslaughter charges for the crime of saying, “Hey, stop that.”

The only person credited with agency in the situation is Penny because his skin color denotes him as a victimizer. Sort of like how an “SUV” plowed through marchers in Waukesha, Wisconsin, two years ago because the driver — Darrell E. Brooks Jr., a black racist — is a victim per the powers that be.

This logic was further on display this past spring after Democrats and other leftist jackals in the media ran cover for the increasingly violent LGBT agenda following a trans radical’s targeting of Christians at a private day school. Instead of taking the opportunity to stand in solidarity with the people who were actually targeted, they opted to blame conservative lawmakers, media companies, and Christians for standing in the way of social engineering genital mutilation progress.

[READ: Here Are Leftists’ Disgusting Reactions To The Horrific Nashville Christian School Shooting]

The “trans community,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said shortly after the murders, is “under attack.” The shooter’s victims did not receive the same empathetic support.

The six Christians who were apparently targeted for their faith, the people mowed down by Brooks, the high likelihood of Daniel Penny facing jail time for protecting other people, and Andreas Probst being murdered for sport do not matter to the civil rights regime. Their innocence does not matter, only their sacrifice does, because it reiterates to the rest of us that there is a tangible cultural hierarchy, fully backed by the U.S. government, against which we are powerless.

Specific groups are insulated and emboldened to the detriment of others.

As one of the left’s leading midwits luminaries, Ibram X. Kendi, says, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

And so the cycle continues with what writer Auron MacIntyre calls an “aristocracy of favored groups” — one not of merit, but of victimhood.

Samuel Mangold-Lenett is a staff editor at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, Townhall, The American Spectator, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @smlenett.

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Democrats Yell ‘Do Something!’ On Guns While Their Prosecutors and Policies Create Our Culture of Crime


REPORTED BY: KYLEE ZEMPEL | JUNE 08, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/08/democrats-yell-do-something-on-guns-but-their-prosecutors-and-policies-create-our-culture-of-crime/

crime at Robb Elementary School, Joe Biden visits after Uvalde shooting

Just as the humanitarian crisis at the border is the predictable result of the left’s open-borders policies, so our crime wave is a consequence of their anti-punitive philosophy of criminal justice.

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Since a spate of recent shootings, Democrats led by President Joe Biden have been busy exploiting the tragedies to call for more gun control, go after the “gun lobby” bogeyman, and yell that we must “do something!” about firearm-related crime. They’ve been clear that they aren’t interested in talking about effective solutions that don’t involve gun-grabbing, so they probably also don’t want to talk about who’s responsible for America’s unsettling crime wave: the left.

Meanwhile, as of late Tuesday night, the Associated Press projected that San Francisco voters had handily recalled left-wing District Attorney Chesa Boudin, whose soft-on-crime policies wreaked havoc on the California city.

While a prosecutor recall might seem disconnected from an uptick in mass shootings and subsequent gun-control chatter, the two are intertwined. Just as the humanitarian crisis at the border is the predictable result of the left’s open-borders policies, our crime wave is the inevitable result of their anti-punitive philosophy of criminal justice. And the biggest culprits are progressive prosecutors like Boudin who champion Democrats’ policies and have been installed across the country after being bankrolled by left-wing radicals like George Soros and other groups.

Prosecutors Who Don’t Prosecute

According to a new report out from the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund (LELDF), Soros alone has poured a staggering $40 million into prosecutor races to help elect 75 leftists that have contributed to the crime wave, and he’s just one of many billionaires working to destroy law and order, influence elections, control the media, and otherwise destroy the country.

The left and its skeptics continue to use guns as a scapegoat and say there’s no direct correlation between left-wing prosecutorial philosophies and crime, but the evidence suggests otherwise. According to the LELDF report, more than 40 percent of the roughly 22,500 homicides in 2021 — so more than 9,000 — happened in these 75 district attorneys’ jurisdictions, which accounted for more than one-third of last year’s violent crimes and property crime.

These DAs’ decisions produce consequences even in the areas they don’t oversee, however, since there’s nothing keeping released offenders in the prosecutors’ jurisdictions. Light sentences, low cash bail, and other slaps on the wrist send criminals right back onto their streets and those of their neighbors.

“These radical activists now preside over 72 million Americans and 40% of US homicides,” said LELDF President Jason Johnson, noting that Soros has already spent another $1 million to date this year to boost his preferred prosecutors. “Soros is using that campaign money and the hundreds of millions more for supporting organizations to quietly transform the criminal justice system for the worse, promoting dangerous policies and anti-police narratives to advance his radical agenda.”

The country saw the effects of progressive prosecutors up close over the last holiday season. The Waukesha parade murderer didn’t need a firearm. To kill six people and injure 62 more, he needed only a vehicle, a soft-on-crime district attorney’s office that let him out on a pittance of bail, and leftist policies that “guaranteed” offenders would kill people. It’s evil like that, enabled by leftist policy failures, that expose America’s crime problem as being so much bigger than a few psychopaths with guns.

Democrats’ Progressive Dream

But the rise in crime is much bigger than Soros and 75 district attorneys too. More fundamentally, it’s the predictable result of a long list of so-called leftist policy goals and beliefs that are prevalent not only among the radicals of the left, but also among the mainstream Democrat Party.

For a particularly grotesque example, look at cities in blue bastion California — particularly Boudin’s San Francisco, where the sidewalks are littered with used needles, passed-out junkies, and homeless encampments, and street sightings of human feces number in the tens of thousands each year. Facing an explosion in shoplifting, retailers in Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Francisco were helpless to do anything but reduce store hours. As a Wall Street Journal article noted in October 2021, “Walgreens has closed 22 stores in [San Francisco], where thefts under $950 are effectively decriminalized.”

That little $950 tidbit is courtesy of Democrats’ woke Proposition 47, which more than doubled the amount a person could steal before facing a felony. In other words, Prop 47 reclassified felonies as no-biggie misdemeanors. Crime in the Bay Area has gotten so bad that even Democrat Mayor London Breed was forced to admit that the left’s soft-on-crime approach has led to “all the bullsh-t that has destroyed” San Francisco.

Meanwhile, in 2021, Los Angeles experienced its highest number of homicides in 15 years, and looters ran rampant on that area’s train tracks, with some railroad companies reporting a “160% increase in criminal rail theft,” and “approximately $5 million in claims, losses and damages” to the train companies alone.

The Left’s Culture of Crime

The crime wave isn’t confined to California, though. It’s swept through Democrats’ strongholds across the rest of the country too. As The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd wrote in January, “New York, D.C., and Chicago all saw ‘record-high‘ murders in 2021 while Philadelphia; Portland, Oregon; Louisville, Kentucky; and Albuquerque, New Mexico, ‘had their deadliest years on record.’”

And let’s not forget the scores of rioters, looters, and vandals who went unpunished after the 2020 summer of rage that resulted in billions of dollars in damages. In fact, rather than condemn them, prominent Democrats including our very own Vice President Kamala Harris helped bail out of jail those who were caught. It was Minneapolis Democrats who voted to dismantle its police department in 2020, enabling a crime wave there. And Democrat lawmakers joined the chorus of those calling to “defund the police,” only stopping when they realized that abhorrent position could hurt them politically.

This approach to law and order is to say nothing of the left’s other principles that cultivate a culture of death, such as the celebration of snuffing out human life in the womb and exploiting children as sex objects.

It’s hard to take Democrats’ tired calls for gun control seriously anyway, given their debunked talking points and faulty logic. But it’s especially disqualifying for the left when you take into account all the lawlessness and violence they enable as hallmarks of their criminal justice platforms. If voters in far-left San Francisco can see it, it’s a safe bet the rest of the country can too. America’s culture of crime belongs to Democrats, and no amount of gun control can fix it.

Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religious liberty, and criminal justice. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

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