The New Normal

How long will people keep feeding the system before they realize the scam they’re paying into?

Yes, they’ll steal. Yes, they’ll run from police. Yes, they’ll barge their way into your home. And you can’t do anything about it.

Something I find interesting about our current moment is that police shootings don’t seem to be receiving the same level of public scrutiny they did as recently as a few years ago. I have my own theories as to why that is which I won’t get into (at least not in this post), but it certainly hasn’t stopped the usual suspects (pun intended) from trying get the public riled up once more.

Over the long weekend, Black Lives Matter (been a while since we’ve heard from them) attempted to get people out on the streets to protest the police killing of Ta’Kiya Young, a pregnant 21-year-old who was accused of theft by employees at a grocery store in a Columbus, Ohio suburb. Her unborn child didn’t survive.

Police have released body cam footage of the incident. Watch and judge for yourself whether this shooting was justifiable (WARNING: graphic content):

https://twitter.com/AmiriKing/status/1697945281621324118

CBS News summarized the incident:

The video shows an officer at the driver's side window telling Young she has been accused of theft and repeatedly demanding that she get out of the car. A second officer is standing in front of the car.

Young protests, and the first officer repeats his demand. Then both officers yell at her to get out. At that point, Young can be heard asking them, “Are you going to shoot me?” seconds before she turns the steering wheel to the right and the car moves toward the officer standing in front of it. The officer fires his gun through the windshield and Young's sedan drifts into the grocery store's brick wall.

Officers then break the driver's side window, which Belford said was to get Young out of the car and render medical aid, though footage of medical assistance was not provided.

It’s a tragedy, one that was totally avoidable. Maybe she didn’t need to be shot and I’m not 100% certain drawing a gun was at all necessary in the moment, regardless of the risk faced by the officer. But above all, she didn’t need to run from police, either. If you’re troubled by this shooting, ask yourself: had she complied, would she and her unborn child be alive or dead today? Don’t overthink the question.

And this is what I have a hard time fathoming: why do certain people seem to think disobeying law enforcement is a good idea? Did she really think driving off would make the problem go away? This isn’t even a matter of respect for police, this is a matter of common sense. Someone who believes those charged with enforcing the law are simply going to throw their hands up and say, “We tried, it’s not worth it,” is stupid, to be blunt. There’s just no other descriptor that comes close.

Some have criticized the shooting officer’s decision to stand directly in front of Young’s car. Perhaps it was reckless to do so, but it’s also besides the point - Young had no right to disobey a lawful order by driving away. The officer may have believed Young would’ve been deterred by him standing in front of the car, but this clearly wasn’t the case. Had he been run over, deadly force would’ve absolutely been justifiable and Young’s family would have even less of a leg to stand on in criticizing the shooting. You have no right to run over someone operating in a lawful capacity, so whether the officer was wise or not to stand in front of her car like that is a tactical question, not a moral or legal one.

I’ll repeat this ad nauseam for as long as I live: when you engage in violence, you’ve relinquished control of the situation. Don’t resort to violence and expect others to stand quietly aside. This goes for triple when it comes to the police. It’s literally their job to exercise violence on behalf of society’s ultimate authority, whether you like it or not. As I explained a while back, don’t try to control the situation when dealing with law enforcement. This is simply a game you’re not meant to win.

It’s also never incumbent upon victims of crime or the police to de-escalate the situation. Someone who attempts to run from police isn’t interested in de-escalation. Too many regard it as some sort of trump card that doesn’t get played often enough and while there’s a grain of truth to that, it’s also true that de-escalation requires mutual consent. If the presence of a police officer and orders to cease and desist aren’t enough to stop someone, de-escalation is no longer an option.

None of this has stopped Young’s advocates from suggesting she had a right to run from police. Her family’s attorney drew this very implication in a statement to media. Keep in mind this is an attorney saying this:

In his interview with the AP on Friday, Walton denied that Young had stolen anything from the grocery store. He said his firm found a witness who saw Young put down bottles of alcohol as she left the store.

“The bottles were left in the store,” he said. “So when she's in her car denying that, that's accurate. She did not commit any theft, and so these officers were not even within their right to place her under arrest, let alone take her life.”

In case you missed it the first couple times, this is an attorney talking. I realize learning the legal code can scramble your brain a bit, but as I like to say, don’t outsmart your common sense. If police are called in response to suspicion of a crime, their job is to investigate and find out what’s going on. Ta’Kiya Young never gave them a chance to find out and she certainly never gave herself a chance to tell her side of the story.

In a way, I’m wasting my breath, because it’s really so simple. For far too many, however, they can’t resist making it hard on themselves. I don’t know if they simply don’t possess the mental faculty for making such simple calculations or if they’re honestly willing to gamble with their lives like this, but all I know is it’s all totally unnecessary and almost entirely up to them to decide their fate. Police officers can be difficult to deal with, but so what? People in general can be difficult to deal with. Yes, police officers can ruin your life and some of them abuse their authority if only when they think they can get away with it. Even then, most cops are trying to get through the day in one piece. If you wouldn’t do it or say it to anyone else, don’t do it to a cop. And remember: the situation isn’t yours to control!

It remains to be seen what the ultimate fall-out from this incident becomes. Protests did take place, but they appear to have been localized and peaceful. Eventually, a decision will be made whether anyone will be prosecuted for Young’s death, creating another potential flashpoint. One can only hope further calls for another uprising will again fall on deaf ears.

What’s always bothered me about these incidents is how many people believe police either shouldn’t have bothered to get involved or how resisting law enforcement ought to be normalized. I suppose there are times when disobedience may be justifiable, but as I’ve hopefully argued convincingly, this is a dangerous game to play, no matter how justified you may feel. In Ta’Kiya Young’s case, I don’t think she had any reason to disobey and had she cooperated, she would’ve at most been inconvenienced, not killed along with her unborn child.

At a time when police seem unable and unwilling to stunt a seemingly intensifying wave of crime across parts of the country, the last thing we need is for police to not take action when they’re in a position to do so. Criminals aren’t entitled to special nor even fair treatment, not while they’re outside the court room. Those who think police should’ve just let her run and caught up with her later are making the mistaken assumption the arrest would’ve gone any more peacefully had they done just that.

Furthermore, if police shouldn’t deal with a problem at the moment it presents itself and at the request of citizenry who demanded police intervention, then there’s really no use for police, is there? The fact we have police at all is really the only deterrent we have against crime at this point, but if we set a precedent where the law puts the welfare of suspects ahead of enforcing the law, the system completely unravels and becomes held together only by the willingness of the law-abiding majority to go along with it. But why should we? If some people can just break the rules and nobody does anything about it right then and there, then there’s no use to following the rules, is there? Why should any of us uphold a system even those in charge of it see fit to undermine?

When people walk into a store and steal whatever they want and walk out without any resistance, what’s keeping the rest of us from doing the same? Are we seriously paying for our goods so these businesses can cover their losses resulting from theft?

https://twitter.com/CatchUpFeed/status/1699211276575277497

As long as I live, I’ll never forget what far-left then-Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said during the 2020 George Floyd uprising: If nobody obeyed the law, we wouldn’t be able to enforce the law. It’s true. If every last one of use decided to disobey the law, our society would either collapse or the state would need to resort to brute-force authoritarianism to establish order. Either way, it’s the end of our grand experiment. The system only continues to function because most of us choose to go along with it.

It’s all starting to amount to a raw deal. I never have and never will tell anyone to disobey the law. I’m just saying that we’re running out of reasons to keep going along with this charade.

Speaking Of Theft…

Few things are more emblematic of the increase in crime and disorder than the rampant shoplifting. It’s happening everywhere, in both nice areas and bad. The only reason why it hasn’t resulted in more people getting hurt or killed is because nobody’s really stepping in to stop it in the first place. Then again, I’m not sure more people getting hurt or killed would change anyone’s minds all that much. The demoralization is so pervasive, only a call to arms from the president himself might change anything at this point. As he’s very much the frontman for anarcho-tyranny, I doubt such a call from Joe Biden is coming, nor will it ever.

A few weeks ago, a former New York City police officer wrote an op-ed for FOX News. You can read the entirety of it here, but I want to highlight what I thought to be the most important passage:

This is the part where I am supposed to offer solutions and sunny predictions.

My answer is: nothing. There’s nothing to be done. The progressive canon underpinning these conditions is so entrenched that nuances like plummeting quality of life and corporate flight barely register.  

And so, we’re faced with a discomfiting, even tragic, conclusion: yes, this is the new normal in our cities. Let’s not kid ourselves, folks — this is it.  

If you can live with that, fine. If not, you have two options. You can (physically) fight back, as two convenience store owners did recently in a (predictably viral) video. As Jose Alba did. As Daniel Penny did. Thereby risking felony charges yourself.  

Or: you can just leave. As so many residents are doing.

He’s not wrong. It’s ultimately up to the people in charge to decide this is intolerable and to do something about it. By doing something about, they need to directly target the real problem at hand, not “root causes” or peripheral matters which ultimately deflect from the act of crime itself. The role of the state is to provide peace, order, and protection, first and foremost. If it refuses to do that because of ‘X’ reasons, then it possesses no legitimacy beyond it’s ability imprison or even kill those who dare speak out against it.

This isn’t a problem that can be fixed by voting. If there’s anything else you should’ve learned by now reading this blog, the people in charge aren’t always who you think they are. The people who tend to win elections come from the same political ecosystem as the people they replace. They’re under enormous pressure to appease donors, non-governmental organizations, and special interest groups who hold tremendous sway by bolstering the bids of those running for office. In other cases, they come from the same party. For example, Chicago earlier this year replaced far-left, pro-crime Democrat mayor Lori Lightfoot with an even more radical figure, Brandon Johnson, also a Democrat.

Then there’s the intelligentsia, the folks who think all sorts of sage thoughts about what ails our society, including this expert analysis on vehicle theft:

Once more, it’s never the crime nor the criminal, but some peripheral, if related, issue that nonetheless misses the mark. It may be a stretch to say The New York Times runs the country, but is it, really? The influence they have over policymakers is incredible. The media has increasingly become a mouthpiece for the Regime, an outlet for elite opinion, often saying what those in charge cannot. Forums like NYT are a good way to gauge what our overlords are thinking, plus we’ve seen politicians make the kinds of remarks seen in the op-ed above.

On some level, they recognize they’re failing, but they cannot admit failure, as it undermines their entire argument for staying in power. Staying in power is, ultimately, their top priority and under the ideal arrangement, this would incentivize them to take care of the citizenry, but for a myriad of reasons, it doesn’t work that way in our country. Instead, they double down on their policies to appease the power-brokers, patronize those who keep voting for them, all while tolerating the chaos, disorder, and squalor that’s become so ubiquitous. So much for democracy!

There’s no extent to which the Regime will suppress the law-abiding, tax-paying citizenry to guarantee their continued compliance. Earlier this year, California passed Senate Bill 553, which purports to protect employees and workplaces from violence. However, many are protesting the law, as it requires employers to come up with plans that include workers not confronting criminals or not using force against them to prevent theft and other violations. Those who protested the law include many businessmen of Sikh Indian descent, some of whom were recently caught on camera rendering righteous justice to a thief who attempted to rob a 7/11 in Stockton, California last month.

In short, SB 553 places greater restraints on the part of the law-abiding citizenry, not on the criminal, under the guise of protecting workers and workplaces. Anarcho-tyranny, after all, concerns itself first and foremost with the behavior of the law-abiding, since they, not the criminals, are the ones who buy into the system and keep it going, no matter how backwards and corrupt it might be.

But how long can we keep going like this? How long will people keep feeding the system before they realize the scam they’re paying into? There’s hundreds of millions of people in this country and many more coming in, so there’s no shortage of people to feed the system with, unfortunately. Regimes and societies are resilient things and most people simply aren’t up for a fight, as you’ll see in this next section. I wouldn’t wager there coming a breaking point any time soon.

What I do know for sure is that America’s next civil war is more likely to come as a result of rampant crime than it is because a former president ended up in prison.

Domesticated and Demoralized Beyond Repair

The Kingdom of Sweden was and still is, all things considered, one of the nicest places to live in the world. Its proponents often cite it as superior to the U.S. in every way, owing to its social welfare system and lack of economic inequality.

One area where Sweden’s superiority has faded in recent years, however, is crime. A recent incident captured on first-person video is emblematic of what the crime situation in Sweden has become. In it, a man is seen setting up and climbing a ladder to invade someone’s residence. He forces his way in through the balcony, stabbing the occupants. Here’s the video if you want to see what happened (WARNING: graphic content):

https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1698700046248878233

Twitter account @rcmcsweeney provided a translation of a Swedish article about the incident (he didn’t provide a link, but others have reported a similar account of the backstory):

An Algerian migrant, 26-year-old Mohammed Amana, could not accept that his Swedish girlfriend had broken up with him. On May 25th of this year, he used a ladder to climb into the apartment where she was staying and attacked her with a stone and a knife. The attack was filmed by the ex-girlfriend's friend who was also in the residence.

The woman who had broken up with Mohammed Amana was temporarily staying with a male friend. Amana located her and attacked her with a kitchen knife, as recently reported by Samnytt.

The friend of the ex-girlfriend can be heard saying: “He stabbed me with a knife, he stabbed me with a knife, a large kitchen knife.”

Mohammed Amana was sentenced to two years in prison and is to be deported with a ten-year ban on returning to Sweden. This is not the first time he has been sentenced to deportation, but the earlier deportation was never carried out. Instead, Mohammed Amana has remained in the country and committed several new crimes, for which he has been sentenced in recent years. It remains to be seen whether the new deportation will be carried out.

Like many European countries, Sweden went out of its way over the last several years to accommodate large numbers of migrants, mostly from war-torn Africa and the Middle East, out of a sense of altruism, if nothing else. Unfortunately, this good faith has been met with an intensification of crime and violence, meaning Sweden and the U.S. have now become similarly violent places. These Third World migrants are responsible for a disproportionate number of crimes and have demonstrated cultural incompatibility time and again.

The issue of mass migration in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe is a topic that merits its own discussion. What struck most viewers, including myself, about the video above is how the man filming it made little to no attempt to stop the intruder, allowing himself and the ex-girlfriend to be harmed in the process.

We don’t know the whole story and it’s possible the man filming may have been familiar enough with the assailant to have reason to believe he could talk some sense into him. But when someone brings a ladder and climbs it to get inside someone else’s residence, that’s typically a sure sign they’re not interested in talking it out. I don’t know what the self-defense legal environment is like in Sweden, and it’s very possible the victim may have legitimately feared the consequences of pushing the assailant off the ladder or throwing objects at him. Still, if someone is attempting to enter your home uninvited, you’ve got to make a more forceful attempt to keep them out, no? Surely, even Sweden recognizes one’s right to self-defense within the confines of their residence?

But even if he couldn’t stop the attacker while he was still on the ladder, he could’ve stopped the attacker once he struck his victim and physically climbed onto the balcony? I don’t know how badly he was hurt, but if your fight-or-flight response isn’t kicking in by that point and your aggression isn’t surging (especially if you’re male), then I’m not sure what to make of that, other than maybe the fight has been completely trained out of him.

Violence isn’t always a matter of life and death. For many, I’d say most of us, our only exposure to violence results from a social encounter gone poorly. Sometimes, these incidents become existential, but what triggers the violence isn’t a sense of danger, but a sense of offense. Violence is thus part of what personal safety expert Rory Miller refers to as the “Monkey Dance,” a way of establishing social hierarchy and status.

The incident in Sweden clearly wasn’t that. Our natural human instinct, in response to danger, is to put up our guard, fight, or run away. The man filming the video didn’t do much guarding and he certainly didn’t fight or run away. It’s an alarming level of demasculation, demoralization, and domestication that’s rendered someone totally incapable of putting up any kind of defense.

It’s never my intent to tell anyone to put themselves in harm’s way for any reason. It’s not my risk to take. If anyone thinks confronting a gunman is scary, they have no idea how terrifying it is to face a knife-wielding man in close quarters. But when your life and the life of those you care for are in danger, you need to be able to put up a fight, especially as an able-bodied male. At the very least, you cannot afford to be rendered paralyzed by indecision, as he was here.

My intuition suggests this was someone who had the fight completely trained out of him. It’s unthinkable in a civilization established by the Vikings, but times change, I guess. Through a combination of laws and social norms, the individual filming the encounter has been taught to consider the well-being of his attacker and that violence doesn’t solve problems, even when your life is threatened.

If you ever found yourself in a situation like this, what can you do to protect yourself? If you live in America, there is almost no state in the country that doesn’t recognize the castle doctrine, which obliges no duty to retreat in the face of danger when inside one’s residence. There are differences and nuances, but overall, even states dominated by left-wing leadership recognize a person in their own home has an indisputable right to be there and the aggressor doesn’t, privileging wider latitude in terms of permissible defensive actions.

You’re still required to be judicious - firing off rounds just because someone showed up at the wrong address is never a good idea - but once someone crosses that boundary into your home, as the Algerian migrant in Sweden did, or quite obviously demonstrates an intent to enter your home uninvited, as the Algerian migrant also did, you have strong justification for using violence to stop your attacker. The key is to be able to articulate, after the fact, that you were responding to a clear and obvious threat and that a failure to act would’ve either led to direct harm or exposed you to an unreasonable level of risk.

The ability to articulate the threat is so important, I think the one thing the victim in the Sweden incident did absolutely right is he kept the camera rolling. By doing so, he left no doubt what he and the woman were facing and, at least by American standards, could’ve easily used the evidence to justify force, even deadly force, against the invader.

Having a camera on you and installing security cameras at your residence is quickly becoming a necessity, not an option. You word is simply not good enough anymore and criminals not only have the same legal rights as you, but their actions are regarded as no more or less morally problematic than yours. A guy who keeps climbing a ladder to make way into your residence may be a threat, but he’s not wrong and until he actually strikes, you’re held liable for his well-being, even when using force. Only when the risk of death or maiming is imminent does his welfare become secondary to yours. At least, you’ve got to be able to convincingly argue that.

A lot of this doesn’t make sense, but it’s not supposed to. At least not to you. But it makes sense to the Regime, who want to ensure those who buy into the system keep paying for it, no matter how poorly it lives up to its promises. Giving you no alternative, no way out, a relationship of total dependency, that’s the point.

Those who understand the reality of the social order we live under ought to be better prepared than most to deal with whatever comes our way. There’s no guarantees, of course, but life’s a game. As long as you know the rules and play the game well, you just might make it through in one piece.

Schools - Creating the Next Generation of Sociopaths

I’m going to leave you all with a sobering prognosis on the state of schooling in America:

With summer break over, the break from last year’s campus violence also comes to an end.

Across the country, many teachers have already begun to deal with incidents of violence as some predict things will only keep escalating without a major social shift.

“I’m exhausted and we’re only three weeks into the school year and I’m already burnt out,” said Las Vegas teacher Kristan Nigro.

The kindergarten teacher told NewsNation that her first-day excitement is long gone after an incident last year.

“I had a child who went to my desk and grabbed the adult scissors and opened them and threw them at my face. Thank God I was able to get out of the way and not actually let those collide with my face,“ Nigro said.

The article goes on to speculate why this might be happening. I don’t think it’s any big mystery - schools, public schools in particular, have long been a place where most Americans will be subjected to real-world violence. That said, the fact this is becoming a story suggests school violence is getting to a point where gaslighting and shaming people for noticing isn’t working as well as in the past.

This is probably because the teachers are now becoming increasingly victimized. Kids being bullied has become something we’ve come to take for granted as a society, but teachers hold a special place in our societal hierarchy. Being authority figures, when teachers and school administrators become targets, things are changing for the worse.

We all know, in bad neighborhoods, attacking teachers and school staff is more prevalent that in other areas. However, as a general rule, attacking teachers and staff was taboo. I grew up and went to school in a tranquil part of the country and this sort of thing rarely happened.

Which brings me to my questions in response to this piece: where are these incidents occurring? Who are the perpetrators? I think this issue could turn out more nuanced than suggested. However, I also believe school violence is more prevalent than in the past and that there’s definitely something to teachers and staff finding themselves in the line of fire. I’m not the “Back In My Day” type, but I don’t think kids have the same reverence for authority figures they once did. A big part of the reason is changing cultural norms, but also because neither parents nor schools discipline children the way we used to.

The article quoted Anne Reagan, a pediatric psychologist, who quietly suggests as much:

Reagan believes it will take years to unravel behavioral issues that were worsening even before the pandemic, and parental behavior has not helped.

“So much is just online, and parents and kids are always on their screens, even if they’re sitting on the same couch, they’re not talking to each other. So we definitely are trying to educate caregivers to get back to communicating directly with their children,” Reagan said.

It’s not a stretch to say a lack of parent-child interaction makes discipline more difficult. It all really starts at home, not the proverbial “village.” A village is only as capable as the households that populate it.

All I know is this: behavioral problems at childhood are indicative of behavioral problems as adults. If so many children find it okay to attack teachers and even the parents find themselves unable to restrain them, what does that say about our future? Most of these kids may end up getting straightened out and become productive members of society, but many more won’t. Given the turmoil this country is certain to become embroiled in, we’re looking an even greater critical mass of people who can further destabilize our society. And nothing destabilizes better than lots of young people with nothing better to do than raise hell.

If you have kids, what are you seeing happening at their schools? Do you have any thoughts on how our Swede could’ve protected himself and his friend? What about the police shooting of Ta’Kiya Young? Was it totally unnecessary? Upon whom was it incumbent upon to de-escalate the situation? Let’s discuss in the comments below.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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