Depraved/Deprived

The Price of Permissiveness

I’m depraved on account I’m deprived.

—West Side Story

In our bifurcated mediasphere, two stories have split the cable news networks this week…the Jeffrey Epstein case and the Charlotte murder of an Ukranian woman on a light rail train by a deranged black male with a long rap sheet. So this is a Rorschach Test: Which story plucks your magic twanger? The newly EnLachlaned Foxies are hoping the murder will drive the pedophile from the news. The libs are titillated by the solidifying Trump-Epstein connection (and some in MAGA land are hoping to locate an Epstein-Israel blackmail scheme or Bill Clinton connection). The Foxies are not coy about the racial nature of the Charlotte crime and how neatly it fits into a national obfuscation of the disproportionate number of crimes committed by blacks.

For me, both stories have import.

The Epstein case is the purest example imaginable of predatory depravity by the overclass. Every last aspect of it needs to be unraveled. The Trump Administration’s sweaty efforts to hide and deny the case—”a Democratic hoax,” says Dear Leader—make it all the more suspicious, especially the Epstein money-laundering operation. Once again, we find Russian oligarchs lurking about. The fact that wackorettes Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Bobert and Nancy Mace are leading the campaign for revelation make it that much more delicious for Democrats (never mind that full revelation may bring down some prominent Dems.) There are those who believe the attempt to pave over Epstein explains the various embarrassing bloatings and distortions and misdirections now plaguing the Administration. How does pushing new American manufacturing operations and deporting the Korean workers who are building the Georgia Hyundai factory fit? Wouldn’t some hastily issued work visas for the illegal Koreans gotten Trump his desired result?

Trumpiness grows ever more squalid. This is what a White House spokes-thug had to say about California Governor Gavin Newsom recently:

“Gavin Newsom is a mongoloid who barely registers half a brain cell,” [Steven] Cheung told The Post, using a term for people with Down syndrome that many find offensive, “which is telling because he can barely put together two words without looking like he soiled himself in public.”

Ah yes, Trump’s secret sauce: talking dirty to the horde—breaking the linguistic taboos foisted on American maledom by the feminist Democrats. This grotesquerie has paid big electoral dividends. It has been made possible by decades of Democrat-imposed sensitivity training. The overreach has been subtle…but unrelenting. American men have been made to feel boorish if they talk about a woman’s looks or use the colloquial to describe crazy people or even disabled people (who are, the language police insist, differently abled). I am happy to abide by many of these strictures; they are more civil. But the inescapable message from Feminist-Sensitivity Democrats has been: Hey guys, you’re Neanderthals. Masculinity is toxic. Trump’s counter-message: Hey bro, you don’t need to go around talking like pussies. You can talk about pussies. This is part of Trump’s growing appeal to young black and Latino men. It is brutish to my ear, but Dems won’t be able to compete with Trump for male votes until they stop trying to make them feel guilty. (The use of obnoxious politically incorrect words above is purposeful—they are just words.)

Which brings me to the Charlotte murder. The Republicans have successfully made this a case of Demo-Sensitivity run amok. They have highlighted the racial details that usually are elided by the legacy media. The footage is lurid. The assailant was big, black, braided, with a rap sheet as long as a python. The victim was white, young, attractive and blonde enough to be a Trump staffer. Now, this fulfills the MAGA fantasy of what’s happening in the streets of our cities: black predators, white victims. What is actually happening is this: black gang-bangers, black victims. Black crime is a problem acknowledged by black people and ignored by white liberals; it is why the folks in the poor neighborhoods of DC and Chicago welcome the prospect of federal intervention. And it is why the blatant Democratic incompetence on the issue is so telling: Several weeks ago, I proposed that the Dems respond to Trump’s National Guard deployments by offering up the old Clintonian remedy: more cops. 100,00 more, with more advanced (and, yes, sensitized) police training. A few Dems have started mentioning this. Maryland Governor Wes Moore suggested a more concentrated police presence on the streets of Baltimore. But where’s the national press conference, populated by Democratic bigwigs—Schumer, Jeffries, Newsom, Clinton, Obama and a hundred more—proposing a bipartisan police enhancement bill. (I’m sure they could get some Republicans to sign on.)

There’s another twist to the Charlotte murder that reflects poorly on progressives. The assailant was a violent schizophrenic. Sixty years ago he would have been in a mental hospital—an insane asylum, another phrase that the terminally high-minded eschew. But in the 1960s and 1970s, a series of cases brought by the ACLU and others before liberal judges, led by the DC Circuit’s David Bazelon—call them the Cuckoo’s Nest cases—established the rights of violently crazy people. It was part of a fabulous progressive delusion that was abroad in the 1970s: crazy people were really the sane ones. Society was crazy. It was Jack Nicholson against Big Nurse in One Flew Over…In Ken Kesey’s novel and the subsequent movie, Big Nurse—the system—won. In reality, the system lost, a consequence of bipartisan irresponsibility. It saved money to empty the loony bins. Mental hospitals were shuttered; the new drugs would take care of it; the truly demented would be placed in community-based halfway houses. Trouble was, schizophrenics also had a “right” not to take their drugs. Trouble was, communities didn’t want halfway houses. Enlightenment—the closing of barbaric mental hospitals—brought barbarity to the streets of our cities. The story is brilliantly told in The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen. It is yet another example of why permissive leftists lost the faith of the American people. (Even if liberals were right about the explosive combination of lunatics armed with assault weapons.) Rights compete: Schizophrenics have rights, but society has the right not to be stabbed to death by schizophrenics.

It is painful to watch the forces of civility lose these arguments. But it seems clear that much of what passed for idealism was injudicious permissiveness. This is the root of Trump’s appeal and of the Democrats’ demise.