RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/14/the-civilizational-suicide-of-criminal-justice-reform/

The long and disturbing rap sheet of Frank James, the black nationalist New York City subway shooter arrested on Wednesday and charged by federal prosecutors with one count of committing a terrorist act against a mass transportation system, ought to serve as a national wake-up call. The 24 hour-plus nerve-racking manhunt ended in anticlimactic fashion, with James apparently calling the NYPD to report his own location. But the Brooklyn shooting, which left 10 people with gunshot wounds and 19 others injured in the resulting fracas, stands as the bloodiest act of carnage in the history of the New York City subway system.

It also should never have happened.

James’ rap sheet includes nine previous arrests in New York alone. Those Empire State arrests include such wide-ranging offenses as a criminal sex act, possession of burglary tools and theft of service. His rap sheet also includes three additional arrests in neighboring New Jersey for the equally wide-ranging offenses of trespass, larceny, and disorderly conduct. Most damning, one of the Garden State arrests entailed a resultant charge for a terroristic threat. James, an avowed anti-white racist, had also frequently talked about violence and committing mass shootings on his personal YouTube page—even doing so as recently as Monday, the day before the shooting.

There is no world in which James should have been out on the street, living a normal life. That he appears to be heading for a jail cell for the rest of his miserable life is just, but long overdue: It comes at least 10 gunshot victims and 29 total victims too late. That he was not already incarcerated is yet another data point evincing the woeful present state of the American criminal justice system. But our criminal justice system is not failing for the reasons “criminal justice reform” proponents from the Left and the libertarian faux-Right claim it is failing.

America, in the year 2022, does not suffer from an over-incarceration problem. On the contrary, we suffer from an under-incarceration problem. The sooner we awake from this collective slumber and seize the moral high ground back from the Soros/Koch-funded forces of “anti-prosecution” local district attorneys, “bail reform,” the jailbreak of slashed sentences and the broader civilizational suicide of the “criminal justice reform” movement, the safer and more secure we will be.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/apocalypse-air-bruce-thornton/

Ukraine’s scenes of urban rubble, streams of refugees, and piles of slaughtered civilians redolent of World War II. Continuing masks and lethal lockdown protocols of the Covid plague. Record levels of  inflation and gasoline nearly $6 a gallon.  Unchecked hordes of illegal immigrants and criminals penetrating our southern border. Mayhem, murder, and brazen theft stalking and defacing our cities.

Amidst these portents of apocalypse, it’s instructive to think of W.B. Yeats’ prescient poem “The Second Coming,” and its lines “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,” and to wonder with the poet, “What rough beast, its time come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Such intimations of doom, of course, have been regular episodes in the last hundred years, the “rough beasts” ending up as pretenders. But we can’t rely on the cycles of history to prevent devastating changes in our way of life that will make the previous decades seem like the golden age.

Yeats published his poem in November 1920, when the flawed Versailles settlement of the Great War made optimism for the future difficult. Some knew, moreover, that none of the dysfunctions that had led to war had been corrected. Supreme Allied Commander Marshall Foch prophesized about the Versailles Treaty, “This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.” Communism, Nazism, and Fascism arose, and the Great Depression was the crisis these three vicious political religions did not let go to waste.

Throughout the interwar period, the portents of doom appeared in popular novels and “next war” theorists.  “Trench reminiscences” proliferated, keeping alive the novel horrors of the war like poison gas, machine-guns, and artillery lobbing monstrous shells as heavy as a ton. The aerial bombing of the war’s last years inspired numerous warnings about the even more devastating possibilities of destruction from the air in the next war. Theorists wrote of a “knockout blow” on a nation’s capital that would decapitate the government and turn the streets into “one vast raving bedlam,” as historian J.F.C. Fuller put it.