Crime and Kamala

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If you visit Kamala Harris’s campaign website and click on “issues,” you will find a tepid list of conventional progressive topics — corporate greed, health care, education, child care, and climate change among them.  What you will not find is a single word on crime and especially on migrant crime.  It’s as if crime did not exist.

Kamala’s silence on violent crime actually follows a long history of dismissiveness on the part of progressives.  Liberals seem to find it easy to look the other way when horrific acts of murder, rape, and assault are carried out.  It’s not just that they are covering up for the sake of getting elected; it’s as though they don’t really care.

Among the worst cases this year is that of Joselyn Nungaray, a 12-year-old girl who was murdered and sexually assaulted back in June, allegedly by two illegal aliens from Venezuela who were apprehended and released by border agents under the Biden/Harris open border policy.

The White House response to Nungaray’s rape and murder was that the administration “cannot comment on active law enforcement cases.”  In fact, Biden and Kamala Harris refused even to speak Nungaray’s name.  The explosion of violent crime in the U.S. is a direct consequence of Biden’s and Harris’s open border policy, but Harris in particular seems to find it convenient to ignore the issue.   But if one refuses to speak the name of the victim, how can one express sympathy and grief?  Isn’t Harris bothered by the 23,000 murders taking place annually in the U.S.?

Actually, based on her strict silence and long-held position denying that a crisis exists and by her proposals to aid illegal aliens with free housing, food, education, and health care, one would have to say she is not bothered by migrant crime.  In this way, she is a typical progressive who believes that criminals should get off lightly and that society just needs to accept a certain amount of violence as the price it pays for liberals’ high-minded ideals.  Sanctuary cities are just part of this witches’ brew of liberal thought.

Just as progressives like Harris remain silent on Joselyn Nungaray’s rape and murder, they have been awfully glib about the two attempts on Donald Trump’s life, often speaking about the two attempted assassinations as “apparent”  or “security incidents” or being dismissive in other ways (“attempts on presidents’ lives are not rare,” according to The Conversation).  If we ask our A.I. co-pilot, we learn that “elections are a super complex topic that I’m not trained to chat about.”

Then there’s the line that Trump brought it on himself by not agreeing with every progressive policy.  Of course, a candidate who talks about “America First,” American greatness, the right to life, gun rights, and freedom of speech is going to make himself a target.  He kind of deserves it.

That was what I heard on some of the mainstream news stations just hours after each of the two assassination attempts.  And there was no indication of concern for a man’s life.  Instead, Harris, Biden, Schumer, and others kept saying that Trump is a “threat” to democracy and that he “has to go.”  Not very sensitive just hours after he was nearly killed.

But progressives like Harris are not very sensitive about life if someone gets in their way.  African-Americans constitute about 30 percent of Democrat voters, so one would think progressive would demonstrate concern about black victims of violent crime.  The fact is that 92% of blacks who are murdered are killed by other blacks.  Kamala Harris has never, to my knowledge, acknowledged this fact, nor has she expressed much sympathy for the thousands of victims, most of whom reside in Democrat-run cities.  But if anyone is going to address the high level of violence in these cities, one needs to acknowledge the facts about the killings.

I am deeply disturbed by the dangerous conditions in which many blacks, and others, live in our big cities.  I am especially grieved by the numbers of children who are killed and wounded each year in these cities.  Now there is another reason to be concerned, as Latino gangs take over whole sections of America’s cities.

But where is Kamala’s concern for those who live with black-on-black crime or Latino gangs?  She speaks in grand terms of an “opportunity economy,” but what about the simple process of protecting ordinary Americans by deploying more police and prosecuting criminals to the max when they are apprehended?  From Kamala there is only silence, which suggests to me that, like millions of other progressives, she just doesn’t care.

Kamala is wrapped up in her grand plans of “saving the world” — that’s what her campaign website is full of — while she can’t see the violence taking place right in front of her.  Even something as terrible as the October 7 attack on Israel and the fate of those killed and the hundreds taken prisoner does not seem to faze her.

Since that attack, while Israel has continued to be targeted by thousands of missiles from Hamas and Hezb’allah, Harris has worked to pressure Israel into a ceasefire agreement that would only strengthen its enemies.  At the Democratic National Convention in August, Harris focused on the suffering of Palestinians: “What has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating.  So many innocent lives lost.  Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety over and over again.  The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.”  What about the suffering of Israelis?

Once again, Harris seems to be able to gloss over the suffering of ordinary persons when that suffering does not fit her ideological schema.  In the past, that kind of blindness was the source of thousands of genocidal acts by Marxists, who always claim that the elimination of ideological opponents is necessary to their plan to make the world a utopia.  Never in human history have Marxists succeeded in creating a utopia, but they have caused hundreds of millions of deaths to secure their own power.

It is frightening to see a leading presidential candidate with so little apparent compassion for everyday Americans.  Writing a $25,000 housing check (at the expense of others) won’t help a family on Chicago’s South Side escape violence.  Where are they supposed to go with $25,000 — something that won’t happen anyway, because expenditures are controlled by Congress?

What America’s victims need is genuine compassion coupled with a defense of free enterprise that would lift them out of poverty and make it possible for them to escape the dangerous areas where they live.  Kamala Harris does not appear to see this fact.  She will not even pronounce the names of those who are killed.  How can we expect any effective solutions from her?

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).

Image: Mobilus In Mobili via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped).