When Will It Ever Be Okay To Fight Back?
If someone attacks or tries to kill you, it’s your patriotic duty to be victimized.
If it has yet to arrive in the rest of the country, anarcho-tyranny has certainly been a fact of life in New York City:
A hard-working Manhattan bodega clerk who was forced to grab a knife to fend off a violent ex-con, now finds himself sitting behind bars at the notorious Rikers Island jail charged with murder and unable to post $250,000 bail.
The sky-high bail for Jose Alba — who has no known criminal history — was just half of what controversial Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office demanded, despite surveillance video showing the clerk being assaulted by his alleged victim in the bodega.
Alba, 51, was charged with the fatal stabbing of Austin Simon, 35, who can be seen storming behind the counter at the Hamilton Heights Grocery on Broadway and West 139th Street to attack the store worker Friday night.
“It was either him or the guy at the moment,” Alba’s daughter Yulissa told The Post Wednesday, saying it was a case of self-defense.
“He’s never hurt anybody. He’s never had an altercation where he had to defend himself. This is the first time for him.”
This Twitter thread does an outstanding job of summarizing what happened during this incident.
A number of observers pointed out the “Amiri” written on the back of Simon’s T-shirt. Amiri is apparently a high-end clothing brand whose cheapest, most casual T-shirts cost well over $300. Simon got himself stabbed and killed because he picked a fight over a bag of chips that cost less than $10. Violence can’t get more senseless than that, but none of this is supposed to make sense. It’s just a fact of life for far too many in this country.
Mayor Eric Adams paid lip service to Alba, saying:
“My heart goes out for this hard-working, honest New Yorker that was doing his job in his place of business, where a person came in and went behind the counter and attacked him,” Adams said about 51-year-old Jose Alba at a press conference.
But Adams also said:
“The DA has a non-mandate, where we cannot dictate or mandate how he determines how he’s going to prosecute crimes,” Adams told reporters. “That is up to the district attorney, and I’m not going to second-guess the district attorney for his actions.”
We live in a time where mayors, representatives, and presidents, particularly on the Left, as a group, are activist-minded, have wasted no time sharing with the world their thoughts on a given case and their support or opposition for a ruling or verdict. Our leaders aren’t interested in being fair and neither is Adams. As the New York Post editorial board explained:
Hmm. The mayor had no problems “second-guessing” Staten Island DA Mike McMahon’s decision to hit a grocery-store worker with a 24-hour jail stay for seeming to strike former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Adams called that lockup “unfair” — and explicitly urged the DA to consider prosecuting Giuliani for filing a false police report.
Mayor Adams doesn’t care about Jose Alba or the right to self-defense. A most cynical politician, Adams is making sure he’s on record as positioning himself on the right side of the case, while giving a nod to his party’s side, which is allied with the criminal class of the country who often do the dirty, thankless work of enforcing the Regime’s dictates. It’s worth noting anarcho-tyrant President Joe Biden and his second-in-command Kamala Harris, neither of whom have any shortage of things they want to say whenever a mass shooting occurs or when the Supreme Court issues a ruling they disapprove of, have said nothing about the Alba incident. I guess his life doesn’t matter!
Under anarcho-tyranny, the state sees no meaningful difference between someone like Alba and someone like Simon. Generally, nobody has a right to attack or kill another human being, except in a case of self-defense. For Alba to be arrested and charged with murder despite there being no question he was viciously attacked first demonstrates that, at least in New York, there’s exists no right to self-defense. If someone attacks or tries to kill you, it’s your patriotic duty to be victimized.
Without a right to self-defense and a culture that encourages the innocent, law-abiding citizen to keep their own conduct above reproach at all times, while tolerating the actions of the degenerate and deviant, the result is a chaotic, disorderly, and oppressive society. Except the oppression is at the hands not of the state, but of the degenerate and deviant. Look at another incident which recently occurred at a New York restaurant:
Again, the senselessness of it all:
This isn’t the behavior of victims. This isn’t the behavior of people in fear of their lives. This is the behavior of social predators, who act this way thinking they can get away with it or because they’re willing to pay the price in doing so. Either way, there’s nothing preventing this sort of thing from happening and attempting to defend oneself or fight back will be met with the full force of the law. Again, the Regime doesn’t distinguish between prey and predator. As far as they’re concerned, the proper response to the behavior seen by the savages in the video is to stay out of their way and allow them to destroy and terrorize, for the state will deal with it after the fact.
But the rule of law is upheld not when savages are arrested or put down, it’s upheld when these things either don’t happen or, when they do, they’re squashed on the spot. A bomb which has detonated cannot be disarmed, but this is precisely the Regime’s approach to law and order: let chaos and degeneracy run rampant and just throw them in jail afterwards, only for them to end up back in the streets so they can continue to be menaces to society.
Really, when a person is able to do something like this and nobody stops them, who’s really running things in our society?
Meanwhile, some people were being manhandled for refusing to wear masks. I’m not defending her actions, but my point is that there’s a very clear disparity in what kind of deviance is tolerated by society and by whom.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the book Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein, which inspired the better-known 1997 blockbuster movie. Though much of the story focuses on the existential battle between humanity and a species of predatory aliens, for me, the most fascinating part of Starship Troopers is the backstory - how’d the human government depicted in the novel, the Terran Federation, come to be?
It’s a long story, but the short version is that the world fell into disarray at the end of the 20th century. A series of wars created a great upheaval, leading to the destabilization of societies all around the planet. Crime and delinquency surged, but governments proved unable to unwilling to do fulfill their end of the social contract by protecting the citizenry and maintaining order. Until one day, a group of citizens, many of them veterans of war, formed a militia in Aberdeen, Scotland and declared war on the criminals and gang ravaging their city. Within months, the militia defeated the criminals, executed a number of them, and restored order.
However, the government, which seemingly had nothing to do or say concerning the crime and the gangs, suddenly felt threatened by the emergence of “vigilantes.” And why wouldn’t they feel threatened? Nothing undermines the legitimacy of the state more than people willing and able to not only do the job of the state, but to do it better. As a result, the government mobilized against the Aberdeen Militia, but this only galvanized similar movements around the world inspired by the events in Scotland. Eventually, this globalized uprising displaced the existing order and created a new order centered on the ideals established by the militias that started it all.
Centuries later, by the time the story of Starship Troopers begins, the human government was a veritable empire, governing a world where, to quote the novel, personal freedom for all is greatest in history, laws are few, taxes are low, living standards are as high as productivity permits, crime is at its lowest ebb.
Starship Troopers is just a story, yet I can’t help but draw parallels. Jose Alba, of course, was no militiaman nor vigilante. He was just a man running a business, trying to make a living, just like all of us. He was victimized by social predators that state and society had failed to deter and protect him from. His district attorney, his mayor, all the way up to the president, cared nothing for his well-being before or after this fateful incident. But boy, they’re all hot and bothered by the fact he dared to use deadly force against his attacker! Instead of training their sights on the people most responsible for this incident - criminals - they instead train their sights on the man who did the very thing the authorities continuously prove worthless at doing: preserving life and property.
Many people become victimized crime out of fear. Fear of getting hurt or killed, or even fear at getting in trouble with the law. A society can go on for a long time like this, as America proves each time the sun goes up and and goes down. But when it gets bad enough for a long enough time, people won’t stand idly by and sacrifice their lives at the altar of Black Lives Matter, criminal justice reform, or the Woke Leftists in power. Remember the story of Bernhard Goetz? He became infamous for shooting four criminals who attempted to rob him while riding the New York City Subway in December 1984, a year 1,450 homicides occurred in the city (488 occurred in 2021).
Americans don’t view crime as a national security issue, but they better start doing so. Society exists because it’s safer living together than individually. Rampant crime and delinquency undermines society, but America tolerates it as the cost of living with other people. We can’t stop all crime and delinquency, but this is why we have laws and enforcement. Yet, somehow, we’ve reached a point where having laws and enforcing them as a means of imposing costs for crime and deterring it has become a controversial topic. Perhaps it’s a byproduct of decadence, but a society that’s decided protecting itself isn’t worth the cost is courting self-destruction.
I’ve made it clear in these spaces and elsewhere that there’s no civil war coming any time soon, at least nothing at the scale and size of the American Civil War or the Spanish Civil War. But there’s an exception - if incidents like what happened to Jose Alba keep occurring and social predators continue to destroy anyone and anything in their way every time they get angry, and the state continues to enable these savages in their assault on civil society, then there will be a backlash. There will be more Albas and Bernhard Goetzes. It’s when a big enough number of citizens decide to take the law into their own hands that America’s second civil war will begin.
Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.
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