{"id":2249,"date":"2020-10-19T05:52:57","date_gmt":"2020-10-19T12:52:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.crimeandconsequences.blog\/?p=2249"},"modified":"2020-10-19T05:52:57","modified_gmt":"2020-10-19T12:52:57","slug":"the-criminal-not-just-as-societal-victim-but-as-hero-of-the-resistance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crimeandconsequences.blog\/?p=2249","title":{"rendered":"The Criminal, Not Just as Societal Victim, But as Hero of the Resistance"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m normally not a big fan of Andrew Sullivan, but he has a thought-provoking essay<\/a> out titled, “Why Is Wokeness Winning?”\u00a0 This passage in particular struck me:<\/p>\n

BLM\u2019s critical race activists do not support reforming the police, they want to abolish them entirely. In fact, they demonize all cops as \u201cbastards\u201d, and they justify violence and exonerate crime as legitimate resistance to the far greater crime of white oppression.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This crystalizes a thought I’ve had for a while about our opponents’ thinking:\u00a0 The reason we should go soft on criminals is that we have the theory of moral culpability, not merely misunderstood, but backwards.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Old fashioned liberals have been pushing the medical model of crime for decades, to wit, the notion that crime is not a moral failing but an illness, and what’s needed is not for the criminal to reform but for us to realize that we<\/strong> need to reform, by becoming more compassionate, caring, giving, etc.<\/p>\n

Wokeness, by contrast, takes a giant leap forward (or more correctly, backward):\u00a0 Criminals are neither morally deficient nor<\/strong> ill<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0 They are, very much to the contrary, as the Sullivan essay puts it, the vanguard of “legitimate resistance to the far greater crime of white oppression.”<\/p>\n

We should not mistake the mind-numbing implications of this theory.\u00a0 It’s not just that criminals should not be punished; it’s that they should be rewarded if not revered.\u00a0 They have the courage to give us what we have coming\u00a0 —\u00a0 the “reckoning,” as it’s often put.<\/p>\n

Sullivan continues (emphasis added):<\/p>\n

[W]hat also make CRT [critical race theory] so successful is ruthlessness. Those who hold a view of the world in which only power, and the struggle for power, matters, have few qualms in exercising it. After all, under CRT, power is always on the side of the white cis-heteropatriarchy, so payback is always fair play<\/em>. Discriminating against the unwoke or whites or males or the cis-gendered or Asian-American, is not just fair, but vital. Shutting down speech protects the oppressed; bullying on social media and in the workplace becomes a form of virtue; mercy and forgiveness are mere buttresses for white supremacy…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s not much of a leap, if any at all, to see that crime too is “payback.”\u00a0 Property rights, the right to feel personally secure, the right to live under the rule of law\u00a0 —\u00a0 all these are mere accouterments and facilitators of white supremacy.\u00a0 Their destruction\u00a0 —\u00a0 by strong arms, rapists, thieves and swindlers\u00a0 —\u00a0 is perhaps a rough but surely a necessary payback on the road to the New Nirvana of Equality.<\/p>\n

I’m not enough of a student of history to know if this kind of thinking was the ideological spawning ground for the Brownshirts, although I wouldn’t be surprised.\u00a0 But for however that may be, it’s increasingly clear that it’s the petri dish of the new and more aggressive arguments we are seeing in behalf of abolishing punishment as punishment has been understood in this country up to now.\u00a0 We should abolish it, you see, because we have grievously misunderstood who, as between the person we call the criminal, and the person we call the crime victim, actually deserves to suffer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m normally not a big fan of Andrew Sullivan, but he has a thought-provoking essay out titled, “Why Is Wokeness Winning?”\u00a0 This passage in particular struck me: BLM\u2019s critical race activists do not support reforming the police, they want to abolish them entirely. In fact, they demonize all cops as \u201cbastards\u201d, and they justify violence and exonerate crime as legitimate resistance to the far greater crime of white oppression. This crystalizes a thought I’ve had for a while about our opponents’ thinking:\u00a0 The reason we should go soft on criminals is that we have the theory of moral culpability, not merely misunderstood, but backwards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-factors"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Criminal, Not Just as Societal Victim, But as Hero of the Resistance - Crime & Consequences<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.crimeandconsequences.blog\/?p=2249\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Criminal, Not Just as Societal Victim, But as Hero of the Resistance - Crime & Consequences\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I’m normally not a big fan of Andrew Sullivan, but he has a thought-provoking essay out titled, “Why Is Wokeness Winning?”\u00a0 This passage in particular struck me: BLM\u2019s critical race activists do not support reforming the police, they want to abolish them entirely. 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