Tuning Out Wokeism By Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness
The current madness is the stuff of history as we watch it predictably unfold, until—and if—a few, a “happy few,” finally say to the mob, “no mas.”
If wokeness should continue and “win,” by now we all know where it will end up. After all, this is not a prairie-fire, peasants-with-pitchforks, spontaneous bottom-up revolution.
The woke Left seeks a top-down erasure of America, engineered by the likes of LeBron James from his $40 million estate talking revolution to Oprah at her $90 million castle, as Mark Zuckerberg throws in $500 million here, and his colleagues $400 million there, and as the top executives of Coke, Target, and Delta Airlines believe their $17 million-a-year salaries make them experts on the crimes of non-diversity, exclusion, and inequity. Anytime revolutionaries at the outset of their enterprises seek exemption from the consequences of their own ideology, we know their plans will end badly for everyone else.
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911 No Longer
As big-city prosecutors choose not to prosecute “property crimes” or “brick and mortar” arsons and thefts, or what they consider “minor” misdemeanors or “nonlethal” felonies, crime spikes. The ancient principle of human nature then reigns supreme. The criminally inclined conclude the upside of hurting the weak, killing the innocent, stealing, destroying, looting, or simply causing mayhem far outweighs the rarer downside of being arrested, convicted, incarcerated, or worse. So all deterrence is lost. A cycle of chacun pour soi prevails.
Police in response make the necessary adjustments. Consider their bleak choices. Either they:
1) Go into increasingly high crime areas and get attacked or shot in the failed effort to make an arrest or restore calm; or
2) proceed to make an arrest, but the suspect, usually with prior felony convictions, resists, bolts, or attacks, and they use force to subdue him. In some cases, they can make a decision to risk doing so lethally, if they judge, rightly or wrongly, that the arrested is a threat to their lives. As a result, they are suspended, ruined, doxxed, vilified in the media, and their families and homes are put in danger; or
3) they apprehend the suspect, make the arrest without incident, but the woke district attorneys decide the suspect was not worth the time and controversy of prosecuting or find that the police acted in a way that might be suspect or at least alienate a jury of the suspect’s peers. Therefore, the arrested is released—omnis effusus labor; or
4) they safely arrest the suspect without incident. The state successfully indicts and prosecutes the accused. And if he is found guilty, he is incarcerated to protect society and to pay for his crimes.
In these revolutionary times, I think plenty of police officers—if they still have career choices and can afford temporary financial losses—will make the necessary adjustments. So they will decide that the odds of scenarios one through three are as great or greater than number four.
Therefore they will quit, retire, or move to rural, mostly crime-free jurisdictions. Or if not, they simply will not respond promptly to 911 calls from high-crime areas, and perhaps suggest that other police, those less likely to inspire community wrath, go in their stead.
The logic of these choices results in another series of likely unfortunate consequences:
Either: Police are still dubbed racists for not responding to the cries for help of vulnerable inner-city residents and for putting greater onus on minority officers who then must take greater risks than their colleagues. I think the above is already occurring and explains in part deracinated police forces, dangerous increases in crime, and essential no-go zones of chaos in our major cities. The upscale who demanded these changes are exempt by their own security measures or ZIP codes from suffering from them.
