RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/second-thoughts-in-new-york

When David Soares was elected district attorney in 2004 in Albany County, New York, he enjoyed united support on the left; even the radical Working Families Party had endorsed him. A childhood immigrant from Africa, Soares doesn’t lack for “lived experience.” Over nearly 19 years in office, he’s consistently backed progressive criminal-justice reforms. But Soares is now demoralized, seemingly near tears when he tells me that no one will talk about the victims of violence, who—in Albany, as in New York City—are disproportionately young black men.

As DA, Soares has seen firsthand the role that 2017’s Raise the Age law, which significantly scaled back punishments for 16- and 17-year-old criminal offenders, played in worsening crime. Since that law passed, youth gun crime statewide has doubled—and youth gun victimization has nearly tripled. About 75 percent of violent felony cases now get handled in family court, which returns teens to the streets, where they often commit new crimes or become victims themselves of tit-for-tat gang warfare. “We witnessed the murder of a young man at the hands of another young man that had gone through the family court Raise the Age process . . . a minimum of three times,” Soares told local legislators in July. “This was a system that was never designed to handle or deal with violent—super, super violent—youth.”

Legislators have responded to his alarm with vitriol. Earlier this year, the New York State Senate’s counsel disinvited Soares from testifying at a hearing, worried that he (a black man) would talk about black crime victimization. Agency leaders, journalists, and reform advocates have denounced him for highlighting the concentration of violence in black communities and the role of misguided laws in enabling it.

Perhaps even more disheartening for Soares are calls from prominent leaders, who thank him for speaking out—but refuse to do so themselves. As Soares notes, an unprecedented proportion of New York’s leaders today are African American. Accounting for only about a fifth of New York City’s population, and a smaller percentage of state residents, blacks are now especially overrepresented at the top of its public-safety-related agencies. The lieutenant governor, attorney general, parole board chairman, Senate majority leader, and Assembly speaker and majority leader—all are black. Downstate, Mayor Eric Adams is black, as are the deputy commissioner for public safety, heads of the mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice and the Department of Probation, the NYPD’s outgoing commissioner and its current second and third in command, the U.S. attorneys for the Southern and Eastern Districts, the district attorneys of Manhattan and the Bronx, the public advocate, and the city council chairwoman. Shouldn’t they feel secure enough to confront the issue?

But for true-believer progressives, who wield tremendous political influence, certain ways of evaluating crime policies are viewed with genuine contempt: pointing to the unintended negative consequences of reforms, stressing the need to use data to evaluate policies, and acknowledging how individual accountability and culture play vital roles in crime prevention.

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Debt, including unfunded liabilities, threatens to bankrupt us. The southern border has become a porous venue for a record number of illegals and the drugs many bring into this country. An epidemic of crime has transformed our cities. Democrats have weaponized the criminal justice department to go after political opponents. Republicans, in a rush to isolationism, have abandoned global responsibilities – underestimating threats to democratic institutions posed by Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, and Iran’s Mullahs. Color-blind meritocracy and biological sex have given way to harmful fantasies, with preferential treatment for some groups and favored pronouns for others. A desire for clean energy is countered by demand for clean-technology factories and electricity-hungry data centers, “leaving,” as Evan Halper wrote last week in The Washington Post, “utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid.” Biden’s mandate that two thirds of all new cars be electric by 2032 will increase the demand for electricity. One asks: is the country witnessing the death of common sense and entering a death spiral?

I suspect everyone, no matter their political preferences, agrees that we live in contentious times – politically, technologically, and culturally. Of the two Presidential candidates, one is visibly senescent and the other is “the crudest trash-talker in politics,” as Barton Swaim wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. AI threatens to disrupt our lives in unknown ways. DEI, CRT, gender neutral bathrooms and gendered-altered athletes have turned high schools and universities into places alien to parents and alumni.

Perhaps we should step back. “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” is an aphorism usually attributed to Mark Twain. It suggests that while each era is different, there are recurring themes.

https://www.jns.org/words-matter-as-much-as-weapons/

U.S. President Joe Biden devoted his Ramadan greeting this year to the “terrible suffering” of the Palestinians and the “appalling resurgence” of Islamophobia in the United States.  

He began by citing as fact the fake data of the Gaza Health Ministry, claiming: “More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of them civilians, including thousands of children.”

Before going on to refer to those displaced by the war and “in urgent need of food, water, medicine and shelter,” he expressed sympathy for the American Muslims mourning the loss of loved ones in Gaza.

Not a word about Hamas. Not a single reference to the Oct. 7 rape, torture, immolation and abduction of innocent Israeli men, women and children—including Arab citizens and foreign nationals—that sparked the war.

No naming of the American citizens who are among the 134 out of 253 remaining captives. No blame placed on the terrorists responsible for the massacre and its aftermath.

When he did get around to mentioning the hostages, it was in the context of efforts “to establish an immediate and sustained ceasefire for at least six weeks as part of a deal that releases hostages.”

This was his segue into an old la-la-land fantasy: the failed paradigm of working towards a “two-state solution to ensure Palestinians and Israelis share equal measures of freedom, dignity, security and prosperity.”

If the moral equivalence between a genocidal terrorist organization and the only democracy in the Middle East weren’t sufficiently egregious, Biden quickly shifted gears to highlight another falsehood: the “appalling resurgence of hate and violence toward Muslim Americans.”