If The Rules Stop Working, People Will Stop Obeying the Rules
Liberals Have Thrown Out the Rulebook
This tweet on X was interesting to me because it hints at a larger phenomenon in the United States that isn’t being discussed as much as it should be:
The much discussed murder this guy is referring to happened in Charlotte and you’ve probably already seen the horrifying footage or the aftermath more times than you’d like:
You might say, “Wow, he has 14 arrests? Well then, why was he still on the streets?”
That’s a really good question. Look at this and tell me if you think this is someone who should have been walking around as a free man, doing whatever he wants:
Brown was revealed to be a career criminal who has spent most of his life in and out of prison.
A Daily Mail review of police records found that he was charged with misusing 911 as recently as January, when he told cops he believed someone had given him a 'man-made' material that controlled his actions.
He was released without bail and a trial pending when he allegedly stabbed Zaruska to death.
Brown served five years in prison for a 2014 armed robbery and was released in September 2020. (Hawkins’ note: The maximum sentence for armed robbery in NC is 17 years.)
In February 2021, Brown was arrested for assaulting his sister in Charlotte and leaving her with minor injuries, according to police records obtained by the Daily Mail.
That same month, he was again arrested for injury to personal property and trespassing.
A police report from that incident said Brown “returned to the address after being told he was not allowed back and kicked and damaged the front door of the listed victim's residence.”
In July 2022, Brown was arrested for a domestic disturbance.
“[Brown] was arrested for disorderly conduct. The suspect was yelling and cursing, causing a disturbance and drawing the attention of multiple tenants while on the property,” a police report read.
Brown's arrest records go as far back as 2007, when he was still a minor.
Over the next seven years, he was arrested at least six times for crimes including felony larceny, robbery with a dangerous weapon, and communicating threats.
According to the Charlotte Observer, most of the charges he faced during that time were dropped.
What are we looking at here?
A violent, mentally ill, career criminal who has been arrested over and over again but has been treated with kid gloves every step of the way.
Against that backdrop, we’re supposed to be horrified that there are people who don’t give a damn about due process and think we should shoot this guy in the head and drop him dead in a ditch instead of going through an excruciatingly slow process where people will make more excuses for him, his lawyers will try to get him off on technicalities even though we’ve all seen him murder someone in cold blood, and if he’s found guilty, he’ll be handed over to the same justice system that has been giving him a “get out of jail free” pass for his whole life.
What’s wrong with this picture? I will tell you what’s wrong with it.
A lot of people look at the “rules” of our society in a very legalistic way. In other words, if it’s not written down and passed into law, then it’s not really a rule. However, this a very stilted way of looking at a society’s rules because they encompass much more than that. Morals, unspoken assumptions and reasonable expectations are all part of the “rules.”
For example, even if there was a law saying that butchers could secretly stuff their sausage with sawdust, the butcher’s customers would feel like he broke the rules if he did that because they expected to get food, but instead they got something inedible. The butcher could say, “what I did was perfectly legal,” but he’d still lose all of his customers because they would feel like the rules of how things are supposed to work between a butcher and his customers were broken.
Similarly, if you pay taxes for a fire department, you’re not going to get a packet in the mail explaining what your taxes buy, but you will still have certain expectations. You expect there to be a fire department. You expect the firemen to be well trained. You expect them to show up promptly if there’s a fire and make a good faith effort to put it out. Even after all of that, they may still fail and you could lose your house, but if they did what they were supposed to do, they at least lived up to the rules.
So, getting back to “due process” — it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. On the contrary, it’s one link in a chain that makes up the way we deal with criminal behavior.
It’s all well and good to say, “Due process is important!” That’s absolutely true, it is, but what about the rest of the chain that led to this guy being free to murder someone? Why wasn’t this guy in jail? Why was Jordan Neely, who famously died while being restrained by Daniel Penny on the NYC subway, still walking around free after being arrested 42 times? Why was Daniel Penny ever in a situation where he had to defend his fellow passengers from Jordan Neely? It’s because the rules have stopped functioning properly.
Soon after that murder occurred, Charlie Kirk was also murdered by a liberal. Afterward, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of liberals openly celebrated a man being murdered in front of his child because he had pretty standard conservative beliefs. Liberals in every walk of life didn’t just think, “I didn’t like him much,” they wanted the entire world to know that they were having a good old time because he’s dead. Then, even while that was still happening, we had some Democrats go, “We must all condemn political violence, so we need unity” while liberal pundits acted offended conservatives didn’t seem to be taking them up on their call for “unity.”
Of course, that’s not how unity works. Unity doesn’t come as a result of a few politicians saying some magic words and making it appear, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of his hat. Unity comes as a result of actual unity. It comes from liberals actually being sorry Charlie Kirk died, caring about whether their rhetoric contributed to his death and genuinely wanting to make sure this doesn’t happen again, as opposed to, “Let’s taunt conservatives with this and hope for some more killings,” which is pretty much how things have gone since then on the Left. The old rules, that say Americans should pull together after a horrible incident like this aren’t working, because the rest of the rules have been egregiously broken.
This is not new.
We have these kind of breakdowns of the rules happening all over our society. How about liberal protesters being allowed to block the road at will in a lot of liberal cities, just because they feel like it? This is supposed to be illegal, and it’s an enormous inconvenience to law-abiding citizens. Yet, what do we see happening over and over again? The police protect the criminals blocking the road from the law-abiding citizens who are being unwillingly held hostage on the road, and then, when they’re finally moved, the bad guys get such a light slap on their wrist that they feel comfortable doing it again.
How about squatters walking into someone’s house, setting up shop, and then having the police and the state side with them over the actual homeowners for months on end, even though they’re nothing more than trespassers?
What about schools in America that keep failing no matter how much money we put into them? “Hey, we need to raise your taxes for schools again. Don’t you care about the education of our children? This will fix the problem!” Then, they get the money, there are no improvements, and the cycle gets repeated a few years later. Where’s the accountability?
Heck, where’s the accountability with what’s done with our tax dollars ANYWHERE in government, at any level? They have the nerve to call the people paying taxes “greedy” for not wanting to give the government more of our money, but the cash may as well have been burned in a furnace for all the good that was done with it.
If the rules say we have no choice other than to give the government our money in taxes, shouldn’t the rules also mean that the government has a responsibility to be good stewards with our money?
We could even point to this with Donald Trump in a wide variety of ways.
Why were Republican voters as a group willing to support a loud-mouthed, rule-breaking, loose cannon with no political experience? Because they kept voting establishment Republicans into office, and those politicians refused to do what they campaigned on over and over and over again. Aren’t politicians supposed to keep their campaign promises? Aren’t they supposed to represent the interests of their constituents?
Why did Republicans tolerate Trump’s ethical lapses, crude behavior, and mistakes? Because they saw Democrats getting a free pass for all those things over and over again.
Why don’t Republicans give a damn about some of the aggressive, norm-breaking behavior Trump has engaged in during his 2nd term? Because they watched Democrats act in the same kind of aggressive, norm-breaking way again and again without consequences.
It’s like we’ve lived in a world where Republicans get into the ring with boxing gloves on and Democrats get in with a bat. Now, Trump’s getting in the ring with a bat, too, and people are worried about what that means.
It means we’re in danger, but we’re not in danger because of Trump; we’re in danger because the formal and informal rules of our society have already broken down all around us, but we’ve ignored it.
In other words, Trump didn’t throw out the rulebook, he’s just the first Republican President to play by the same set of rules the Democrats do.
We’re also not supposed to point out the fact that:
* The justice system in NYC was openly weaponized against Donald Trump for political reasons, and many left-wing judges in America habitually legislate from the bench instead of following the law, yet we’re supposed to pretend like our justice system is unbiased, uncompromised, and fair.
* The amount of money the government collects from us in taxes keeps going up, but they still can’t balance the budget. If the rules say they have a right to make us give them our money, why shouldn’t those same rules mean we should reasonably expect to see a modicum of financial responsibility from the politicians in DC?
* We’re forced to pay into Social Security, but the payoff for what you put in is terrible, and the program is an unsustainable Ponzi scheme. If we’re going to force people to pay into Social Security for their whole life, don’t the Americans doing that have a right to at least expect a functional system that will hold up long-term?
* Americans are supposed to welcome immigrants to our country, but we’re also supposed to ignore that many of them end up on welfare (the number should be nearly zero), run down our country, or even wave foreign flags. How does that make any sense? What would we want to allow anybody to become a citizen who is going to make our country worse?
* Everyone is supposed to endlessly bend over backward not to offend loons who make up personal pronouns for themselves, cry over “microaggressions” and need “safe spaces” to function, but those same people and the people who constantly cater to them show zero consideration for anybody else’s rights, feelings, or beliefs. Why are we playing by two different sets of rules?
Rules are supposed to be generally fair. They’re supposed to be evenly applied. They’re also supposed to make the world more functional.
When a society’s rules stop doing those things, the people of that society are 100% right to start questioning those rules. In a society like America, where we’ve had better rules than most other places for a long, long time, that can be a very dangerous thing because it can lead to the public deciding to throw some of the good rules out with the bad.
However, that doesn’t mean it should never be done. At a certain point, if the rules aren’t fixed, people are going to give up on them and demand new rules. The fix for that isn’t complaining that people don’t respect rulebooks that no longer work; it’s fixing the rulebooks so that they work again.
This is the broken window theory.
We should be more like Singapore.
Remember in the 1980s when urban crime, mostly by blacks even then, had skyrocketed and Bill Clinton won the presidency on a tough on crime platform? Hundreds of thousands more cops, three-strikes, stop-and-frisk. It all worked, and crime rates plummeted. Then the idiot leftists started their "mass incarceration" lie. I interact with these social justice numbskulls every day and they cannot get to any rational consequences point with their stupid-making bleeding heart. The criminal justice system is racist because... hey, look at those statistics. So, pull back and be nice and those poor minorities will behave better. These libtards actually believe this. And as their belief system crumbles... proven wrong with the expected jack in crime because there are fewer cops and Soros DAs are not prosecuting, and liberal DEI judges are letting them off anyway... they try to fix the data and lie in the media that crime has declined.
Going back, it was liberals that screamed about the problems with involuntary commitment and worked with government cost-cutting conservatives to rid ourselves of asylums.
What you are talking about here I see as simple morality combined with objective consideration of the consequences for rules and rule enforcement. Liberals have proven that they lack the ability to factor either. They are really flawed and incomplete cognitive processing people that should never be given keys to rule.
THAT is the problem in a nutshell. Bill Clinton was not really one of them. The cohort of people that fit into the real left-liberal cohort were bit players in the overall governance of the country. But changes to the economy happened and left liberals gained income and wealth and then used that to infest our institutions. Now they are entrenched and making a big fucking mess of almost everything.
JH: It’s all well and good to say, “Due process is important!” That’s absolutely true, it is, but what about the rest of the chain that led to this guy being free to murder someone? Why wasn’t this guy in jail?
It doesn't seem like he got due process, does it? It seems like he avoided it. He's been avoiding it for a long time.
The system isn't doing a very good job delivering due process. It is failing horribly.