Crime in America was pretty bad when I was a kid but the issue wasn’t sugar coated. There was a whole entertainment genre themed: We need somebody to get rough with this scum. Hollywood churned out quite a bit. It was as entertaining as it was devoid of nuance.
What’s more, popular discontent and a consensus on what to do translated into forceful political action. For instance, the 1994 Crime Bill:
At the local level, guys like Giuliani got elected specifically to deal comprehensively with crime using the broken windows approach of not turning a blind eye to small offences by bums and miscreants. It worked.
I grew up in a mid-sized Southern city that had seen better days just like Times Square. Our downtown was gentrified from a place with a smut shop (owned by an old guess who) and a bunch of rundown buildings into an area with trendy condos, shops, bars and restaurants.
The residential properties are still okay but the retail is in sharp decline as shootings from the nearby projects have migrated into these locations. As SWPL as the transplants who snap the condos up tend to be, they’re still wary of catching a stray round while browsing for clothes.
A sharp contrast between then and now is the lack of self-efficacy that defines the grievances of Heritage Americans about crime. In the past, cinema would cater to our displeasure and politicians would have to do something real about it.
The point of movies these days is to replace white male protagonists or at least insert disjointed diversity into remakes. Meanwhile, the agenda of politicians and prosecutors is a comprehensive reversal of all the progress made in the 90’s while simultaneously persecuting political dissidents and ordinary people who defend themselves from criminals.
My question is where are they taking all of this? What I mean is that with an issue like mass migration, policies are clearly intended to transform the country demographically while procuring an endless supply of compliant cheap labor. With unleashing crime, an antipathy towards Heritage America and our values is easy to discern as a motive. An end goal that’s theoretically feasible? Not so much.
I suspect this is why dissidents trying to conceptualize everything systemically often narrow down to the most terrifying dystopian possibilities. For example, when the manufactured COVID crisis comes along and everyone is required to take a dangerous experimental gene therapy with unknown results, many of us quickly conclude that the objective is to kill a massive swath of the population.
That makes sense in terms of dealing with all these drug addicts living in squalor on the streets. Their immune systems are the least capable of dealing with whatever we could be hit with next, along with all the other useless eaters who are too unhealthy to toil for our overlords. In the very least, it seems more plausible than whatever these politicians are saying about things getting better.
In other words: If there’s no political will to fix the problem, the practical mechanisms for addressing the problem are being dismantled, and this problem will eventually render much of the country ungovernable, maybe they’re letting it happen because they’ve got a more comprehensive solution in mind. By “they,” I’m not referring to the politicians.
I’m not sure if any of this is true or not but what I do know is that if they want to completely control our society, there must be some plan to deal with actual criminals because it’s impossible to run anything without dealing with them.
Prior to the latest round of madness, it seemed like central bank digital currencies would wipe out drugs and dissent by controlling all transactions. Mindless drones would be utilized for the merciless application of force where needed. Maybe an incident occurred at a secret WEF meeting like the ED-209 malfunction scene from Robocop, prompting them to settle on virus hoaxes and lethal gene manipulation. Like I said, I’m bewildered by all of this so I can’t fault anyone for alarming conjecture.
I’m proud to officially announce my candidacy for the office of Dogcatcher.
I think you’re giving the left way, WAY too much credit. Sure they’re evil, but they’re also completely insane. Leftist ideology means that they cannot tell the difference between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor, or between the rightly oppressed and the wrongly oppressed. They cannot process the idea that some people in society *need* to be oppressed, otherwise they will be a constant threat to everyone around them. So more unpunished crime means that there’s less oppression going on, and more liberation, which is the point of leftism. Is it insane? Sure. Hadn’t you figured out by now that leftism is a self-destructive lunatic egalitarian cult?
Stop looking for a secret plan everywhere in their madness. There isn’t one. There is no plan to deal with the crime spike that their policies cause, just like there was no plan in the Soviet Union to deal with the rampant alcoholism that their policies caused. In the world of the leftist, ideology trumps reality. They don’t care what the outcome of the policies are, as long a they were based in correct ideology. If we all end up as alcoholic bums or bleeding on the sidewalk because the ideology was insane, that couldn’t possibly be more irrelevant to them.
When insanity takes the reins, anything is possible. People who think TPTB would never destroy the productive sectors of the economy should spend a little time reading up on what the Bolsheviks did to the Kulaks in the early 1930s.
People seem to have forgotten just how violent America used to be. Violent crime peaked in the 90’s, after having steadily increased since the 60’s. It was on the decline until very recently.
As an example of the post-60’s violent trend, the film Escape from New York shot many of its scenes in New York City without having to alter much of anything for the sets. They simply filmed scenes of New York at that time.