Some Lives Don’t Matter

Consider this reaction to the Kyle Rittenhouse acquittal: ‘if he were black, he’d be in jail.’ Such a sentiment was voiced by many on the Left when they heard “not guilty on all counts.” Let’s look past the blind partisanship overriding the very obvious facts of the case. Let’s look past the misinformation and disinformation propagated by the Press (the facts did eventually emerge in the public sphere). Let’s ponder, instead, the “social justice” undercurrent.

The hypothetical (no matter that a black man, Andrew Coffee, was just acquitted of homicide charges via a self-defense argument – against a SWAT raid no less) suggests that, just as OJ was acquitted to send a message, the demands of social justice supersede the individual matter being tried. That Rittenhouse be found guilty because he is white (that his assailants were white doesn’t seem to matter). In other words, at least some of these caterwaulers wanted Rittenhouse convicted no matter the facts, to satisfy their wokeness and to signal their virtue.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Wisconsin, the aftermath of the Christmas Parade massacre, itself arguably the result of bail reform done wrong, has uncovered a troubling bit of past honesty from the Milwaukee District Attorney whose office let alleged murderer Darrell Brooks Jr. out on trivial bail for punching and running over his baby mama, despite being already on bail on a weapons charge and despite there being an outstanding warrant for his arrest in Nevada.

Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, back in 2007, told an interviewer,

Is there going to be an individual I divert, or I put into treatment program, who’s going to go out and kill somebody? You bet. Guaranteed. It’s guaranteed to happen. It does not invalidate the overall approach.

This is an honest assessment of bail reform. Fact is, no system is perfect, and a reform that seeks to make the system less punitive is going to increase the likelihood of a “miss.”

The honesty is not the problem (indeed, our bail system, too often used for coercion, could use reforms).

The callousness is.

It is a callousness toward individual life that we have witnessed throughout the history of progressivism, whether it be the eugenicists of the 1930s, the Soviet socialists who slaughtered tens of millions and “broke” untold millions more in their gulags, the national socialists who sank the world into a war while murdering millions who didn’t fit their racial purity standards, the photogenic Argentinian revolutionary who opined, “to send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary,” or our modern Best-and-Brightest, who overtly reject the sovereignty of the individual and are demonstrably willing to sacrifice some to their cause.

And what a cause it is!

Under the pretense of justice for poor communities, the Left’s focus is on ignoring crime, emptying prisons, defunding the police, and excusing or justifying the violent and destructive acts of genuinely bad people as a reaction to “systemic” racism. Never mind that those poor communities are the ones most adversely impacted by failing to fulfill one of the most basic functions of government, i.e. public safety. It’s akin to unions defending the worst in their ranks, thereby doing harm to the good majority.

This is no exaggeration. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib wants to empty all federal prisons in the next 10 years (or at least that’s what her bill says. She fumfered and dodged when she got challenged, which poses questions: Did she write it? Did she read it? Is she Machiavellian, seeking to destroy our current form of society? Or is she, as Mark Twain suggested, simply an idiot?).

The examples I cite here are just the latest of many. Black Lives Matter, a movement that had 5 good weeks before it got corrupted, started eliciting an “All Lives Matter” reaction in the wake of that corruption. Many who offered that arguably missed the original point – there is clearly room for reform, as I’ve discussed repeatedly – but as I noted yesterday, it’s become obvious that progressives get such reforms terribly wrong.

We are witnessing the emergence of a terrible truth: Many of those who reject the “All Lives Matter” retort believe that they do not, that not all lives matter. Some don’t, some individuals can and should be sacrificed to the movement. Che Guevara’s ghost is remembering one of his utterances, with a wry smile:

This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.

A people without hate cannot triumph against the adversary.

A young man, who did something he, in retrospect, should probably not have done, but who clearly defended himself against imminent physical danger, has been depersonalized, dubbed a “white supremacist” despite no evidence whatsoever, and deemed expendable to the cause of social justice. By people of means, who live in far greater comfort and safety than those they purport to champion, and who have little use for inconvenient facts or realities.

Columnist Steven F. Hayward noted that today’s Democratic Party has two ‘central manias:’ racism and climate-change action. That their approaches to both harm and cost lives doesn’t seem to matter. Some lives simply don’t matter.

Is it coincidence that the social justice crowd tends to socialist thinking? Is it coincidence that the green crowd tends to socialist thinking? Is it coincidence that the callous disregard for individual lives when their regard clashes with the ideology is found in every iteration of socialism in history?

I think not.