YOUR LUXURY BELIEFS GET PEOPLE KILLED.

I've long feared that there are suburbs and small towns one flash-mobbed convenience store away from going sundown.

It might be that one knife attack on the rapid transit will have the same effect.  Free Press contributor Kat Rosenfeld builds that case.

Until the aforementioned security footage from that night was released—footage that shows not just the moments leading up to [Iryna] Zarutska’s murder, but the horrifying aftermath as Brown stalks up and down the car leaving a literal trail of blood in his wake—the story oddly flew under the radar. It did so for the same reasons that it’s now become a flashpoint in the online discourse about crime, disorder, and public safety in American cities today.

For conservatives, this incident seems a slam-dunk indictment of the progressive attitudes toward policing and criminal justice that emerged in the wake of the 2020 police killing of George Floyd—and accompanying policies that make it virtually impossible to keep serial offenders off the streets. Commentators on the right have noted, correctly, that Brown had a history of violence, a lengthy criminal record, and well-documented mental health issues; he never should have been on the train that night, and if not for having been released pending trial for his most recent offenses by a sympathetic judge, he wouldn’t have.

The greater issue is a cultural one: a growing frustration with what often feels like limitless tolerance for public disorder and antisocial behavior—and with it, a sense that one must not only avoid discussing these things to remain a liberal in good standing, but actively pretend they don’t exist.

Can you think of a better indictment of luxury beliefs?  Suggest that maybe some people ought be in prison or the insane asylum for a long time, and risk not being invited to the next wine tasting.

The problem with this taboo around certain uncomfortable truths about public disorder is that when you make discussing those truths a thing that is Simply Not Done by decent progressive people, you leave the field of discourse wide open to the kind of person who cares about neither progressive politics nor decency. That is where we are now.

Good liberals, for instance, would rather die than address the fact that Decarlos Brown Jr. is not just homeless and mentally ill but black, as people who perpetrate this kind of violence disproportionately are. In lieu of a thoughtful, data-driven conversation about why this might be and how to solve it, discussing this fact is now the gleeful and exclusive purview of trollish accounts.

Catch the False Dilemma, dear reader?  It is simple enough to have a thoughtful, data-driven conversation about the way luxury beliefs don't work out, on the rapid transit or in the streets, that establishes the indecency of progressive politics.  Ms Rosenfeld sort of gets it.  "Nowhere is that clearer than in a well-intentioned attempt to give the mentally ill more agency that instead resulted in vastly fewer people accessing the care they desperately needed."

In "On black violence, woke lies, and right-wing rage," Alex Berenson comes to terms with the same challenge, and he too grapples with the tension between the luxury beliefs and the trolls.

I wish this racial gap didn’t exist.

Every American suffers from it. Black people suffer more than white, because most crime is intra-racial, a fact that shouldn’t surprise anyone. People usually commit violence against family members, friends, or people in their neighborhoods. So black people are far more likely to be the victims of violent crime, as well as its perpetrators.

Nonetheless, the crime gap is real, and has been for generations. Whether violent crime is rising or falling, black people are far more likely to commit it.

For a long time, we simply didn’t discuss this fact. Everyone knew it. Maybe people didn’t know the exact statistics, but everyone broadly knew the overall trends.

No one talked about it.

Because to do so had more adverse consequences than ostracism from the gentry liberals' cocktail parties.

[W]ho gains from highlighting black criminality? Obviously, police departments must deal with reality, by focusing their officers and detectives on the neighborhoods where most crime happens. But focusing on the racial disparities in crime seems… unlikely to help race relations. And although rates of black criminality are higher, the vast majority of black people — like the vast majority of white people — do not commit violent crime.

Better, then, to arrest and incarcerate and simply ignore the intersection of race and crime whenever possible.

That might have kept the advocates for going sundown quiet.  But the intersectional left gave those advocates life.

Still, throughout the 2010s, the “Black Lives Matter” anti-incarceration and -police stories gained momentum. To the left, falling crime didn’t signal longer prison sentences had worked. It signaled they were unnecessary.

Then, following George Floyd’s death, calls to “defund the police” exploded. Democratic politicians and prosecutors in cities like Chicago and Philadelphia signaled they would not routinely enforce a wide range of laws or back police who used force in arrests. Many police officers retreated from their work, knowing that they might face lawsuits or worse if they were forced to fight with a suspect.

Within months crime exploded. Murders in the United States rose 30 percent in 2020, the biggest one-year spike ever. Big sections of downtowns in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles became almost impassible, filled with open-air drug use, aggressive panhandling, and street crime.

The post-Floyd crime wave ended the open calls to defund the police, but it didn’t end the left’s general dishonesty about race, crime, and policing.

Into the breach step the trolls.

Now the right is responding to the left’s misleading arguments about crime and race in the most inflammatory possible way. Commentators with huge audiences are highlighting cases in which black men have committed unprovoked crimes against white people, especially white women, especially young white women.

Thus the image of Decarlos Brown Jr standing behind Iryna Zarutska, about to strike, now viewed hundreds of millions of times — if not billions — on X.

I don’t know how to put this genie back in the bottle. These images are powerful because they’re real. They cut to a truth about crime in the United States that the left will not acknowledge. But they cannot help but inflame anger about race. At least some people posting are using them for just that reason.

There are likely others who might like the downtown streets and the buses, trolleys, and trains to be safe.  Mr Berenson doesn't offer such potential allies any help.  "The left needs to accept that a lot of those people are going to be black.  But I wish the right wouldn’t say so out loud."

Sure, let's ask the respectable conservatives to avert their eyes, whilst the trolls are calling attention.  Perhaps some levity from the Babylon Bee will help.  "Dems Warn Surveillance Videos Perpetuate Stereotypes By Accurately Depicting Events."  Or a meditation from my Chicago Boyz colleague David Foster on the stiffening of the springs that support the social order, and the tautening cables of high expectations.  "I think it’s pretty clear that the people and forces in American society who are working to relax St-Exupery’s springs are largely the same ones who are working to slacken Ruby LaRocca’s cables.  The consequences have been devastating."

So they have, and a trio of reporters in New York's Times see in the relaxing of the springs and the slackening of the cables validation for their luxury beliefs.

After the video’s release, a number of influential conservatives also accused major news outlets, including The New York Times, of ignoring the story because the crime was committed by a Black man against a white woman.

“The reason for the media silence is racial,” Dinesh D’Souza, the right-wing commentator, wrote in an online post on Sunday. “If the killer were white, this would get coverage. Of course if it were a white assailant murdering a Black victim, then it would be front-page headlines everywhere.”

The idea that mainstream news outlets downplay crimes committed by Black people has become more of a talking point in some conservative circles in recent years. The critique has emerged even as liberal critics of the news media have argued that crime coverage by American news outlets is distorted by anti-Black bias.

In North Carolina, as in other Southern states, newspapers in the Jim Crow era often egregiously exaggerated stories about Black criminality. Among other things, such stories served as a precursor to a white supremacist uprising in Wilmington, N.C., in 1898, in which at least 60 Black men were killed.

Well, yes, that's the origin story of southern segregation and northern sundown towns; the criminality didn't even have to be real, and the attitudes the reporters call attention to are still with us: Emmett Till was lynched within my lifetime and James Byrd ran afoul of some sheetheads out making sport late in the twentieth century.

That article concludes, none-the-less, with a backhanded acknowledgment that luxury beliefs get people killed.

In a phone interview on Monday, Pat McCrory, a Republican who served as mayor of Charlotte and later as the state’s governor, criticized the city’s current government, which is dominated by Democrats. Mr. McCrory said that local leaders had become too lax in its handling of “repeat criminals” and homelessness.

“Frankly, Charlotte has been implementing what I’d call progressive policies that are making us more like Atlanta and Portland than Charlotte,” he said.

With Pajamas Media's Victoria Taft calling out the consequences of those beliefs, perhaps in ways that Ms Rosenfeld or Mr Berenson would decry.

The leftist politicians want to be the moms and dads of the crazy killers but not of the people who really need their help, which is everyone else.

A corollary to the real story here is that when the left has gotten the narrative intentionally wrong, i.e., George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown stoked fires of purposeful misinformation so high that parts of cities burned down and lives were destroyed. Cops were assassinated in Dallas and New York. Antifa and BLM tried to murder police by burning down precincts with police inside in Seattle and Minneapolis.

And we're not letting them get away with it anymore. That's why the CNN panel and those like them are so upset. That's why the New York Times is PO'd that they're playing catch-up on the narrative. We beat them off the line. They're in our dust. They don't get to plot the narrative anymore. We see the news and we say it out loud.

Egregiously exaggerated stories leading to a different sort of uprising, anyone?  Moreover, the Times's very manual of style is feeding the trolls.  "Crime against Iryna Zarutska was committed by a capital "B" Black man against a lowercase "w" white woman.  You are a second-class citizen."  Yes, there is an elaborate justification, originating with the Associated Press, using all the rhetoric of Critical Theory to justify that practice.  It convinces nobody who isn't already a True Believer.

Finally, to circle back to a possible new era of sundown towns, consider Vince Coyner's "Abandoned Shopping Carts, Litter, and the Decline of Black America."

The black community’s disengagement from ordinary acts of civic responsibility is harming America as a whole, but mostly, it’s harming blacks. To save their communities, blacks need to reengage with what was once normative polite conduct across American society. To appreciate this point, consider the tales told by abandoned shopping carts and litter.

No doubt, at those lakefront liberal cocktail parties, a messy neighborhood is simply an expression of authenticity.  What comes next will not be amusing.

The perfect example of this is when individuals or packs of looters steal from stores. When it becomes expensive enough, either through having to implement security measures, replace damaged property, or buy new inventory, eventually the stores close. The result is that citizens of the community have fewer shopping options available to them. Then, when storefronts remain vacant, they become magnets for graffiti and vandalism. More vacant properties scare off potential customers, attract the homeless, drug addicts, squatters, and, eventually, more crime. The final outcome is usually that property values and, therefore, tax revenues decline, ending in community decay.

This tragedy, which used to be largely confined to black or urban neighborhoods, is today spreading into the suburbs and the rest of the country. The consequence of this problem, and the fact that most of it is being done by blacks, is shredding civic order and, frankly, increasing the division of races. The meme “Black Fatigue” has taken hold for a reason and seems to be almost ubiquitous. Black sportscaster and commentator Jason Whitlock says of it: “It is the antithesis, it is the yin to the yang of Black Lives Matter. It’s white people boldly expressing their fatigue with black people… This was inevitable.” He’s right.

As this anti-social behavior expands, it hits companies that are perceived to have significant black clientele. Carnival Cruise Lines has come under fire because of recent rule changes that are said to target black customers. Spirit Airways has seen its stock collapse 85% in 5 years, and Six Flags recently implemented chaperone requirements due to problems with “teens,” resulting in a decline in attendance and a $100 million loss. These companies are trying to survive, and their black customers are making it difficult.

But this uncivilized behavior shows signs closer to home as well. It’s results in schools in black neighborhoods where kids can neither read nor write, which in turn results in half of black high school graduates being functionally illiterate, not to mention the third-world level of murder and violence among blacks, regardless of their economic status

The bottom line is that a civilized society requires that citizens respect a certain level of behavior and decorum, and we’re seeing too many black Americans ignoring that basic responsibility. When people on the edge of the Overton Window of the culture wars (that is, people most normal Americans would find deeply offensive) start saying things that significant numbers of people agree with, that suggests a tipping point might be near.

That tipping point might be nearer than you think.  Common Dreams reports, "Multiple Historically Black Colleges and Universities Go Into Lockdown Amid Wave of Threats."  Author Brad Reed attempts to reassure readers with "The threats to the colleges came one day after the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University, although there is so far no indication that the threats are related."  Inside Higher Ed's coverage has the rest of the story.

A predominantly white institution, the University of Central Florida, also reported receiving a threat Thursday. The Orlando Sentinel, which obtained a copy via an anonymous tipster, reported that the expletive-laden message threatened Black students and referenced the killing of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee stabbed on a train in North Carolina.

A message from the UCF Police Department Thursday afternoon said, “Similar messages have been reported at other universities around the country.” The police department added it was working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to assess the threat but does not consider it “to be credible.”

People on social media get to spout off, and the fact that you get to spout off for free makes it easier to spout off.  So far this week, there have been no mob actions on campus, although tempers have flared in a few places.