I have a different take on the lower response Q&A post (which also frankly surprised me as I find your writing highly engaging and insightful). It’s clear you are very well informed and write well on these issues. I imagine most readers assume you are high up in some sort of important field or will be so soon. Therefore, we are hesitate to ask anything that could doxx you or upset the apple cart we all now enjoy or your future position in your career. For instance, I wanted to ask what your dark hero “origin story” was that made you aware of the issues of crime and official deception. But that could be too specific. For me it was a mugging in my college days that was so brazen and by such a lowlife that all the years of bleeding heart propaganda disappeared in an instant, and I started to learn what per capita means.
That's very flattering on you. That said, I made it clear to everyone that maintaining anonymity is important to me and I think everyone understands that any question I answer, I do so on my own terms.
But unless people ask, they won't get an answer of any kind. Hopefully, in the future, having mailbag sessions will be more viable.
In the past two days I’ve been in two unrelated meetings where very successful people shared stories of crime and disorder in Toronto: an executive’s vehicle being stolen from the company lot at 8:30 am, carjacking at a Starbucks in a nice neighborhood, home invasions in pursuit of car keys… I believe those stories more than statistics.
I think the criminal justice system has mostly abandoned objective justice based on impartial standards and embraced social justice based on identity. This story from Canada summarizes recent cases where modest sentences were given for serious crimes:
The same identity obsession has invaded medicine. Recently a new medical school at Toronto Metropolitan University announced that 75% of slots would be reserved for diversity entrants:
A backlash is overdue but the alliance of white leftists with self-interested minorities is pretty powerful.
I don’t have a proposed solution other than to not prop up the system: don’t volunteer, donate money, join the military, sign up for organ donation, donate blood, etc. If I don’t have a stake in society then to hell with them all, I will just take care of myself and my family.
Well the stories are obviously true, it's a question of whether it fits into a broader trend. That said, I maintain the real problem is anarcho-tyranny, which isn't about crime rates, but about how our society handles crimes. There's far more evidence out there that criminals constantly get away with crime and are aided and abetted by the state than there's evidence crime is skyrocketing.
That White-minority alliance is definitely powerful and I'm not sure what's going to break it. The economy, maybe, but White leftists are willing to take a subservient role, which is a big reason why the coalition holds together.
I agree - just do the bare minimum. The Regime takes your money and tells you to fuck off. I say fine.
One more interesting development. They just had a provincial election in British Columbia, our equivalent to Washington or Oregon (although politically it’s finely balanced and the right can win).
In recent years, there was a very left wing government that was the embodiment of anarcho-tyranny. The basically dormant Conservative Party rose up and became a populist right party. destroyed the soft right Liberal Party, and took the election to a dead heat. The mail-in votes are being counted.
What is interesting is that the Conservatives did better with Chinese and Indian minorities than the white upper middle class. So you had a coalition of small town populists and immigrants up against Native Indians, government workers and PMCs.
What this tells me is that, if things get bad enough, the middle class and working class immigrants will move right. (The permanent welfare types are irredeemable.)
It also seems to show that the PMC and elderly white leftists are also irredeemable. Leftism has become the standard ideology of the professional classes, in some cases literally as they won’t let you study medicine unless you at least pay lip service to their ideology.
From the polling this seems to be happening somewhat in the US as the professional whites move to Kamala and Latinos and some blacks move to Trump. So the electoral map in the US may continue to shuffle and the right shouldn’t write off mildly blue states.
This is stunning. The U.S. and UK are so far off from this. What you see there is what you see in France or Germany.
I don't know enough about Canadian politics to opine, but it seems very different from the U.S. Perhaps the economy plays a big part? But the UK has had a dismal economy for the youth and they're firmly entrenched on the Left. Also, American non-Whites are still very much a leftist bastion, especially among Asians.
Canada has a multi-party system, so the Conservatives would only need around 42% of the votes to win… still it’s a very strong result.
We’ve had 9 years of Trudeau with minimal economic growth, high inflation, skyrocketing housing prices and uncontrolled immigration, especially South Indian.
At this point the archetypal Liberal voter is an aging public servant or retiree. Everything has worked out great for them:
1. They have lots of real estate, so higher RE prices are all good.
2. Indexed public pensions and public sector pension plans shelter them somewhat from inflation.
3. They don’t go out at night so crime is less of an issue.
4. Not looking for part-time or entry level jobs, so immigration less of an issue. In fact they like having servile Indian retail clerks and lots of Uber drivers available.
5. They loved Covid restrictions and wanted to lock all young people up and force vaccinations.
In contrast the young people have gotten a terrible deal:
1. Rent has skyrocketed. I paid around $1200 for a 1BR in downtown Toronto in the early 2010s. It’s probably double now.
2. High housing costs mean you can’t afford a house. High rent means you can’t even save for a down payment.
3. Higher crime makes it scary to go out or use public transit.
4. High immigration males job searches difficult.
5. Indian male students crowd the junior colleges and universities, making for a miserable and downgraded experience for all. Somehow this Indian flood is particularly annoying, mostly male, lots of entitlement, low achieving and pushy. Even many legacy Indians don’t like them.
6. Forced vaccinations to enjoy extracurriculars and attend university for several years. The left went truly crazy here.
So basically the left has made life so miserable that the failure is undeniable. I think it’s a bit like the Milei situation in Argentina. If you are young, something needs to really change and you’re desperate.
Democrats in the US are protected a bit by a stronger economy and Republicans being strong enough to curb their worst instincts. In Canada Trudeau has got his way on everything for 9 years.
Canada’s immigration has historically been a bit more skills based and higher end than Europe. We do have immigrant slum dwellers like Somalis in Edmonton and Jamaicans in Toronto and they vote left, as you would expect. It’s the more middle class types that are now voting more like regular Canadians.
Thanks for explaining all that. It's amazing how different Canada really is. For years, it was seen as an extension of the U.S. except in name. It appears now our paths have diverged wildly. Still, things have been worse in the UK for far longer, yet there's no sign their young people are willing to do anything besides go left. Same with the U.S., even if young males are shifting right. Politics is a complicated game.
You’re welcome. I think that the reserve currency and giant tech stocks are the difference between the US and the rest of the Anglo world, which is struggling very badly.
Partly who is blamed is based on luck. If you are in charge and things fall apart, you get blamed. The Uk Conservatives were in charge for a long time and got blamed, even though in practice they are left wing. I think that Reform UK did pretty well with the young, though, so the trend of the young going right is partly in place.
There's a discussion in that article about a career shoplifter and drug abuser in Kentucky who got 20 years in prison for his latest shoplifting of several hundred dollars worth of stuff.
While I agree about treating crime seriously, my thoughts go back to a Frontline interview I saw years ago with a career prison warden (also in KY ironically): "We need to decide who we're afraid of and who we're mad at. If we're afraid of you or of something you will likely do, you belong here [in his max sec prison]. But if we're just mad you or something you did in the past, we need a different system."
I have determined I largely agree with this. I don't know what that system looks like. Maybe its a form of labor camp. For violent crime, El Salvador's approach makes sense. For drug-fueled property crime, perhaps we should look to Singapore's strategies. Some countries allow low-priority convicts to work in the private sector. I don't know. But that prison warden is right: jails are horrendously expensive places that should largely be reserved for the unrepentantly violent.
One thing that article does not talk about is something you've mentioned before: the use of private stores (ala Costco or SamsClub) to deter shoplifting. WalMart has a huge problem with theft; I doubt Sams does. I think you're correct that we should expect to see more of this. A world that refuses to make store safety a public good will end up with it being a private good.
I'm all for having a punishment system and a corrective system. The problem is, we've gone so far off track that punishing them is really the only way to restore order. Only after order is restored and, more important, our culture goes back to valuing order once again, can we have a corrective system. Remember, the Left is just as much against labor camps as it is against prisons, unless it's for White people and non-leftists.
In the short term, lots of people are going to have to be incarcerated or permanently removed from society. The cancer is just too big. That said, I mentioned this in the last essay, but being an older population should help. I think the future of crime is these one year spikes, followed by slow and steady decline, like what we've seen since 2014, followed by yet another cycle. The rate of crime will increase over the long term, but we won't have another true crime "wave" like we saw from the 1960s until the 1990s. We just don't have the proportion of young people necessary to fuel a non-stop crime wave. I suppose that's a good thing, but it also means it's going to take people much longer to start thinking seriously about crime again.
The privatization of all areas of life is definitely a part of our future. I think even beyond the Fourth Turning, things will still very much trend in the direction of privatization, because people will have learned that barriers are actually a good thing and the violence they witnessed will make them wary of making things open to all. However, this will also have the effect of reinforcing strong communities again and by the next Second Turning, there will be a shift back towards public goods, made possible through the restoration of order.
Most of what you write I find reasonable and agreeable. I’m generally not so worried about the crime data as I am with how it gets presented or portrayed. Let’s face it, most people won’t peruse the FBI crime reports. But it gets distilled through mainstream sources and used to paint a picture that’s beneficial to the powers that be. That time when Trump got “fact-checked” over crime was a bit maddening—the moderator was waiting to pounce on him and Trump lacked the rhetorical wherewithal/intellectual chops to push back in a more nuanced way, like Vance would surely have done.
I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say “don’t trust the government, trust your gut” re: crime, but I’ll say I’ve never been more skeptical of the way this data gets presented in the discourse. What particularly worries me is that petty crimes (like shoplifting, turnstile hopping, and vandalism) have become so commonplace that they simply don’t get reported as “crime” anymore—rather, it just becomes a fact of life that we all need to adapt to and quit fussing over, which the official statistics don’t reflect.
The same phenomenon was at work concerning the Haitian cat-eating story. Chris Rufo dug up what was by all means a firsthand account of a cat getting cooked on a barbecue in a different Ohio town, but a mainstream outlet cast aspersions on it and implied it wasn’t evidence! These institutions seem to lack curiosity about stories that contradict the way they wish the world worked…
I just think if you're going to refute the stats, you have to have stats of your own. So much of the "crime wave" talk is anecdotal and we have to be careful of crafting our own narratives based on a distortion or exaggeration or reality. If you just say outright, "They're lying," then there's really nowhere to go from that. You haven't really affected the discourse because you haven't shown they actually are.
The big problem I see is that the Regime won't acknowledge a problem until it's safe for them to do so. Crime wasn't something they talked about until they could say it went down. Same with inflation. We all remember the White House's tack on inflation from 2021 to 2022. Once the rate of inflation slowed, finally, they started talking about it because it wasn't a total drag on their record. Perhaps this is how politics goes in general, but I'm tired of it and the fact the Left has always taken a softer line against crime makes it worse. And you can never take credit for fixing a problem you said didn't exist in the first place.
I think there's something to be said about the amount of crime that goes unreported. I was skeptical at first, but it's plausible. I know there's an exhaustion with the fact the police rarely catching these guys, so you have a lot of people just sucking up the loss, but like I was telling someone else, how long can that go on for? We can only do that in a state of abundance. If things became harder or more expensive to replace, people would be less likely to just suck it up and move on.
I'll say, though, the Regime has narrative-management down to a science. They'll hyper-focus on one specific detail of the story - gangs have "taken over" apartments, cats are being eaten - and they'll scrutinize that one aspect of the story while ignoring the rest of it. Their mentality is that if they can shift public focus onto that one thing and refute it, then they've won. I can't blame them for thinking that, because it works.
There is something that gets forgotten in discussions about crime, and that is there are many different forms of crime. What we are seeing in more recent years, especially in the ghetto, is crime that directly attacks order. The mafia back in the day were not the sanitized, glamorized fiction seen in the movies, but there is some truth to the notion that they kept order in their communities as well. The reason for that was that they didn’t want to ruin the places where their families lived, and because they wanted to leave their kids with an opportunity at a life they didn’t have. This was the case even in some of the older street gangs.
On the other hand, when people go loot a CVS or something, it has a destabilizing effect on a community, and promotes disorder. It attacks the institutions that make life healthy, convenient, and possible. It is, sometimes literally, shitting in your own nest. It makes it so that no one can realistically engage in any kind of business that brings wealth and stability to a community. In short, it ruins it, and is crime against order. It’s not that there is some sort of urban terrorism from that, because there is no real ideology. It stems from the culture of apathy and ignorance that has won over order and discipline in America.
People tend to focus on abortion or LGTBQ issues as being the “culture war,” but the real culture war was the founding culture of this nation, versus the one which emerged in the 1960s. In the new culture, discipline and work ethic was seen as a vice, comfort was king/queen, and the only thing that mattered was doing what made you happy. There are pockets of the old culture holding out, but it is steadily failing, because the new culture is so seductive and erosive. The mafia was the crime of the old culture, while looting a store is a crime of the new culture.
I don’t have any real conclusion to put on it. I don’t think this is by itself enough to collapse the nation, but it shows the rot that these things cannot be dealt with. It also shows that no one is really willing to deal with it, because the cost is too high. Bernard Goetz probably single handedly cut the rate of violent attacks on subways, but ruined his own life in the process. That is another sign of the new culture, the sympathy for the devil, the embrace of evil. The Joker is the hero, while Batman and what he represents is pushed aside. Being “mean” is the most grievous sin. A culture that promotes disorder cannot also act against disorder.
On an historical time scale, this would be compressed down to a blip, an age where an old order faded away and a new and healthier one arose. It’s the period in between the two which won’t be so great. It doesn’t have to be a civil war, maybe just a time and place where you can’t count on anything, including the lights staying on. That would take a commitment to order.
I couldn't have said it any better. I think another aspect of culture that changed radically in the 1960s is how we all became detached from any sense of place. When you become less invested in any one place, you don't care what happens to it, because, if it ever gets bad enough, you can always move to another part of the country. If we were all still spending most of our lives in one place and businesses were run by people we knew instead of big corporations, I think our attitude towards crime and disorder would be quite different if forced to live long-term with the consequences. This is why the constant talk of GDP is so dehumanizing. The Great Replacement is in some ways an extension of our attitude towards the economy: everything can be replaced. If someone steals something, just replace it. None of us have lived in a world where it wasn't easy to replace what was lost or stolen, but that was reality for many of us within the last 50 - 70 years.
This is why I believe nothing bad will really happen until the economy goes south. Material wealth and high standard of living covers up a lot of deficiencies, up to a point. Until theft once again means you can't just go on Amazon and order a replacement, or theft means shelves will remain empty, it's difficult to understand why you don't just let that bastard walk out the store with property just because he's Black.
The Fourth Turning is exactly that in-between period from when the old order faded and a new, healthier one arose. I think you're already seeing the seeds planted for what's to come - young men are shifting right and there's an increasing emphasis, according to Neil Howe, on community. The old way of living still prevails, but I also think there's tremendous exhaustion over it, a sense that this isn't the way. It's just our cultural and political values that haven't shifted yet. That usually takes a war. Wars make people more conservative.
I have a different take on the lower response Q&A post (which also frankly surprised me as I find your writing highly engaging and insightful). It’s clear you are very well informed and write well on these issues. I imagine most readers assume you are high up in some sort of important field or will be so soon. Therefore, we are hesitate to ask anything that could doxx you or upset the apple cart we all now enjoy or your future position in your career. For instance, I wanted to ask what your dark hero “origin story” was that made you aware of the issues of crime and official deception. But that could be too specific. For me it was a mugging in my college days that was so brazen and by such a lowlife that all the years of bleeding heart propaganda disappeared in an instant, and I started to learn what per capita means.
That's very flattering on you. That said, I made it clear to everyone that maintaining anonymity is important to me and I think everyone understands that any question I answer, I do so on my own terms.
But unless people ask, they won't get an answer of any kind. Hopefully, in the future, having mailbag sessions will be more viable.
In the past two days I’ve been in two unrelated meetings where very successful people shared stories of crime and disorder in Toronto: an executive’s vehicle being stolen from the company lot at 8:30 am, carjacking at a Starbucks in a nice neighborhood, home invasions in pursuit of car keys… I believe those stories more than statistics.
I think the criminal justice system has mostly abandoned objective justice based on impartial standards and embraced social justice based on identity. This story from Canada summarizes recent cases where modest sentences were given for serious crimes:
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/how-identity-obsession-keeps-setting-canadas-criminals-free#:~:text=In%20a%20criminal%20record%20spanning,fraud%20offences%20and%20car%20thefts.
The same identity obsession has invaded medicine. Recently a new medical school at Toronto Metropolitan University announced that 75% of slots would be reserved for diversity entrants:
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/bruce-pardy-at-tmu-medical-school-some-students-are-more-equal-than-others
A backlash is overdue but the alliance of white leftists with self-interested minorities is pretty powerful.
I don’t have a proposed solution other than to not prop up the system: don’t volunteer, donate money, join the military, sign up for organ donation, donate blood, etc. If I don’t have a stake in society then to hell with them all, I will just take care of myself and my family.
Well the stories are obviously true, it's a question of whether it fits into a broader trend. That said, I maintain the real problem is anarcho-tyranny, which isn't about crime rates, but about how our society handles crimes. There's far more evidence out there that criminals constantly get away with crime and are aided and abetted by the state than there's evidence crime is skyrocketing.
That White-minority alliance is definitely powerful and I'm not sure what's going to break it. The economy, maybe, but White leftists are willing to take a subservient role, which is a big reason why the coalition holds together.
I agree - just do the bare minimum. The Regime takes your money and tells you to fuck off. I say fine.
One more interesting development. They just had a provincial election in British Columbia, our equivalent to Washington or Oregon (although politically it’s finely balanced and the right can win).
In recent years, there was a very left wing government that was the embodiment of anarcho-tyranny. The basically dormant Conservative Party rose up and became a populist right party. destroyed the soft right Liberal Party, and took the election to a dead heat. The mail-in votes are being counted.
What is interesting is that the Conservatives did better with Chinese and Indian minorities than the white upper middle class. So you had a coalition of small town populists and immigrants up against Native Indians, government workers and PMCs.
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/first-reading-how-immigrants-drove-the-conservative-surge-in-b-c
What this tells me is that, if things get bad enough, the middle class and working class immigrants will move right. (The permanent welfare types are irredeemable.)
It also seems to show that the PMC and elderly white leftists are also irredeemable. Leftism has become the standard ideology of the professional classes, in some cases literally as they won’t let you study medicine unless you at least pay lip service to their ideology.
From the polling this seems to be happening somewhat in the US as the professional whites move to Kamala and Latinos and some blacks move to Trump. So the electoral map in the US may continue to shuffle and the right shouldn’t write off mildly blue states.
According to this, if only 18-34 Canadians voted, the Conservative Party would perform the best:
https://x.com/AgentMax90/status/1848578222545379748/
This is stunning. The U.S. and UK are so far off from this. What you see there is what you see in France or Germany.
I don't know enough about Canadian politics to opine, but it seems very different from the U.S. Perhaps the economy plays a big part? But the UK has had a dismal economy for the youth and they're firmly entrenched on the Left. Also, American non-Whites are still very much a leftist bastion, especially among Asians.
Canada has a multi-party system, so the Conservatives would only need around 42% of the votes to win… still it’s a very strong result.
We’ve had 9 years of Trudeau with minimal economic growth, high inflation, skyrocketing housing prices and uncontrolled immigration, especially South Indian.
At this point the archetypal Liberal voter is an aging public servant or retiree. Everything has worked out great for them:
1. They have lots of real estate, so higher RE prices are all good.
2. Indexed public pensions and public sector pension plans shelter them somewhat from inflation.
3. They don’t go out at night so crime is less of an issue.
4. Not looking for part-time or entry level jobs, so immigration less of an issue. In fact they like having servile Indian retail clerks and lots of Uber drivers available.
5. They loved Covid restrictions and wanted to lock all young people up and force vaccinations.
In contrast the young people have gotten a terrible deal:
1. Rent has skyrocketed. I paid around $1200 for a 1BR in downtown Toronto in the early 2010s. It’s probably double now.
2. High housing costs mean you can’t afford a house. High rent means you can’t even save for a down payment.
3. Higher crime makes it scary to go out or use public transit.
4. High immigration males job searches difficult.
5. Indian male students crowd the junior colleges and universities, making for a miserable and downgraded experience for all. Somehow this Indian flood is particularly annoying, mostly male, lots of entitlement, low achieving and pushy. Even many legacy Indians don’t like them.
6. Forced vaccinations to enjoy extracurriculars and attend university for several years. The left went truly crazy here.
So basically the left has made life so miserable that the failure is undeniable. I think it’s a bit like the Milei situation in Argentina. If you are young, something needs to really change and you’re desperate.
Democrats in the US are protected a bit by a stronger economy and Republicans being strong enough to curb their worst instincts. In Canada Trudeau has got his way on everything for 9 years.
Canada’s immigration has historically been a bit more skills based and higher end than Europe. We do have immigrant slum dwellers like Somalis in Edmonton and Jamaicans in Toronto and they vote left, as you would expect. It’s the more middle class types that are now voting more like regular Canadians.
Thanks for explaining all that. It's amazing how different Canada really is. For years, it was seen as an extension of the U.S. except in name. It appears now our paths have diverged wildly. Still, things have been worse in the UK for far longer, yet there's no sign their young people are willing to do anything besides go left. Same with the U.S., even if young males are shifting right. Politics is a complicated game.
You’re welcome. I think that the reserve currency and giant tech stocks are the difference between the US and the rest of the Anglo world, which is struggling very badly.
Partly who is blamed is based on luck. If you are in charge and things fall apart, you get blamed. The Uk Conservatives were in charge for a long time and got blamed, even though in practice they are left wing. I think that Reform UK did pretty well with the young, though, so the trend of the young going right is partly in place.
Atlantic article unpaywalled: https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/shoplifting-crime-surge/680234/
There's a discussion in that article about a career shoplifter and drug abuser in Kentucky who got 20 years in prison for his latest shoplifting of several hundred dollars worth of stuff.
While I agree about treating crime seriously, my thoughts go back to a Frontline interview I saw years ago with a career prison warden (also in KY ironically): "We need to decide who we're afraid of and who we're mad at. If we're afraid of you or of something you will likely do, you belong here [in his max sec prison]. But if we're just mad you or something you did in the past, we need a different system."
I have determined I largely agree with this. I don't know what that system looks like. Maybe its a form of labor camp. For violent crime, El Salvador's approach makes sense. For drug-fueled property crime, perhaps we should look to Singapore's strategies. Some countries allow low-priority convicts to work in the private sector. I don't know. But that prison warden is right: jails are horrendously expensive places that should largely be reserved for the unrepentantly violent.
One thing that article does not talk about is something you've mentioned before: the use of private stores (ala Costco or SamsClub) to deter shoplifting. WalMart has a huge problem with theft; I doubt Sams does. I think you're correct that we should expect to see more of this. A world that refuses to make store safety a public good will end up with it being a private good.
Thanks for unpaywalling that, BTW!
I'm all for having a punishment system and a corrective system. The problem is, we've gone so far off track that punishing them is really the only way to restore order. Only after order is restored and, more important, our culture goes back to valuing order once again, can we have a corrective system. Remember, the Left is just as much against labor camps as it is against prisons, unless it's for White people and non-leftists.
In the short term, lots of people are going to have to be incarcerated or permanently removed from society. The cancer is just too big. That said, I mentioned this in the last essay, but being an older population should help. I think the future of crime is these one year spikes, followed by slow and steady decline, like what we've seen since 2014, followed by yet another cycle. The rate of crime will increase over the long term, but we won't have another true crime "wave" like we saw from the 1960s until the 1990s. We just don't have the proportion of young people necessary to fuel a non-stop crime wave. I suppose that's a good thing, but it also means it's going to take people much longer to start thinking seriously about crime again.
The privatization of all areas of life is definitely a part of our future. I think even beyond the Fourth Turning, things will still very much trend in the direction of privatization, because people will have learned that barriers are actually a good thing and the violence they witnessed will make them wary of making things open to all. However, this will also have the effect of reinforcing strong communities again and by the next Second Turning, there will be a shift back towards public goods, made possible through the restoration of order.
Most of what you write I find reasonable and agreeable. I’m generally not so worried about the crime data as I am with how it gets presented or portrayed. Let’s face it, most people won’t peruse the FBI crime reports. But it gets distilled through mainstream sources and used to paint a picture that’s beneficial to the powers that be. That time when Trump got “fact-checked” over crime was a bit maddening—the moderator was waiting to pounce on him and Trump lacked the rhetorical wherewithal/intellectual chops to push back in a more nuanced way, like Vance would surely have done.
I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say “don’t trust the government, trust your gut” re: crime, but I’ll say I’ve never been more skeptical of the way this data gets presented in the discourse. What particularly worries me is that petty crimes (like shoplifting, turnstile hopping, and vandalism) have become so commonplace that they simply don’t get reported as “crime” anymore—rather, it just becomes a fact of life that we all need to adapt to and quit fussing over, which the official statistics don’t reflect.
The same phenomenon was at work concerning the Haitian cat-eating story. Chris Rufo dug up what was by all means a firsthand account of a cat getting cooked on a barbecue in a different Ohio town, but a mainstream outlet cast aspersions on it and implied it wasn’t evidence! These institutions seem to lack curiosity about stories that contradict the way they wish the world worked…
I just think if you're going to refute the stats, you have to have stats of your own. So much of the "crime wave" talk is anecdotal and we have to be careful of crafting our own narratives based on a distortion or exaggeration or reality. If you just say outright, "They're lying," then there's really nowhere to go from that. You haven't really affected the discourse because you haven't shown they actually are.
The big problem I see is that the Regime won't acknowledge a problem until it's safe for them to do so. Crime wasn't something they talked about until they could say it went down. Same with inflation. We all remember the White House's tack on inflation from 2021 to 2022. Once the rate of inflation slowed, finally, they started talking about it because it wasn't a total drag on their record. Perhaps this is how politics goes in general, but I'm tired of it and the fact the Left has always taken a softer line against crime makes it worse. And you can never take credit for fixing a problem you said didn't exist in the first place.
I think there's something to be said about the amount of crime that goes unreported. I was skeptical at first, but it's plausible. I know there's an exhaustion with the fact the police rarely catching these guys, so you have a lot of people just sucking up the loss, but like I was telling someone else, how long can that go on for? We can only do that in a state of abundance. If things became harder or more expensive to replace, people would be less likely to just suck it up and move on.
I'll say, though, the Regime has narrative-management down to a science. They'll hyper-focus on one specific detail of the story - gangs have "taken over" apartments, cats are being eaten - and they'll scrutinize that one aspect of the story while ignoring the rest of it. Their mentality is that if they can shift public focus onto that one thing and refute it, then they've won. I can't blame them for thinking that, because it works.
There is something that gets forgotten in discussions about crime, and that is there are many different forms of crime. What we are seeing in more recent years, especially in the ghetto, is crime that directly attacks order. The mafia back in the day were not the sanitized, glamorized fiction seen in the movies, but there is some truth to the notion that they kept order in their communities as well. The reason for that was that they didn’t want to ruin the places where their families lived, and because they wanted to leave their kids with an opportunity at a life they didn’t have. This was the case even in some of the older street gangs.
On the other hand, when people go loot a CVS or something, it has a destabilizing effect on a community, and promotes disorder. It attacks the institutions that make life healthy, convenient, and possible. It is, sometimes literally, shitting in your own nest. It makes it so that no one can realistically engage in any kind of business that brings wealth and stability to a community. In short, it ruins it, and is crime against order. It’s not that there is some sort of urban terrorism from that, because there is no real ideology. It stems from the culture of apathy and ignorance that has won over order and discipline in America.
People tend to focus on abortion or LGTBQ issues as being the “culture war,” but the real culture war was the founding culture of this nation, versus the one which emerged in the 1960s. In the new culture, discipline and work ethic was seen as a vice, comfort was king/queen, and the only thing that mattered was doing what made you happy. There are pockets of the old culture holding out, but it is steadily failing, because the new culture is so seductive and erosive. The mafia was the crime of the old culture, while looting a store is a crime of the new culture.
I don’t have any real conclusion to put on it. I don’t think this is by itself enough to collapse the nation, but it shows the rot that these things cannot be dealt with. It also shows that no one is really willing to deal with it, because the cost is too high. Bernard Goetz probably single handedly cut the rate of violent attacks on subways, but ruined his own life in the process. That is another sign of the new culture, the sympathy for the devil, the embrace of evil. The Joker is the hero, while Batman and what he represents is pushed aside. Being “mean” is the most grievous sin. A culture that promotes disorder cannot also act against disorder.
On an historical time scale, this would be compressed down to a blip, an age where an old order faded away and a new and healthier one arose. It’s the period in between the two which won’t be so great. It doesn’t have to be a civil war, maybe just a time and place where you can’t count on anything, including the lights staying on. That would take a commitment to order.
I couldn't have said it any better. I think another aspect of culture that changed radically in the 1960s is how we all became detached from any sense of place. When you become less invested in any one place, you don't care what happens to it, because, if it ever gets bad enough, you can always move to another part of the country. If we were all still spending most of our lives in one place and businesses were run by people we knew instead of big corporations, I think our attitude towards crime and disorder would be quite different if forced to live long-term with the consequences. This is why the constant talk of GDP is so dehumanizing. The Great Replacement is in some ways an extension of our attitude towards the economy: everything can be replaced. If someone steals something, just replace it. None of us have lived in a world where it wasn't easy to replace what was lost or stolen, but that was reality for many of us within the last 50 - 70 years.
This is why I believe nothing bad will really happen until the economy goes south. Material wealth and high standard of living covers up a lot of deficiencies, up to a point. Until theft once again means you can't just go on Amazon and order a replacement, or theft means shelves will remain empty, it's difficult to understand why you don't just let that bastard walk out the store with property just because he's Black.
The Fourth Turning is exactly that in-between period from when the old order faded and a new, healthier one arose. I think you're already seeing the seeds planted for what's to come - young men are shifting right and there's an increasing emphasis, according to Neil Howe, on community. The old way of living still prevails, but I also think there's tremendous exhaustion over it, a sense that this isn't the way. It's just our cultural and political values that haven't shifted yet. That usually takes a war. Wars make people more conservative.