Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson from The Daily Signal. I’d like to talk about the disturbing epidemic of what I’d call upside-down morality, in which we find every possible way to contextualize or excuse evil and the victimizer, but we don’t show passion or compassion or anything for the victim.
In any time in a society, you get an ology or an idea or a pretext to excuse behavior, you’re gonna get more of it. Let’s take the trans shooter, Audrey Hale, in Tennessee. She obviously acted out of hatred because she felt her gender dysphoria was oppressed by organized religion. She wrote a manifesto. We didn’t get the manifesto. In fact, we heard more about her trans problems than we did the actual reason why she went out to kill these people.
I don’t know if Robert/Robin Westman, another trans shooter in Minneapolis, felt that if he were to also kill young Christian children that maybe society would take a deferential view of him, as they had done with the manifesto of Ms. Hale, but he also acted out.
And my point in referencing both of them is the society itself began to rationalize it or explain the difficulties. They didn’t say such things as: Listen. If a person is taking dangerous levels of hormonal drugs, testosterone, estrogen, if they’re engaged in very powerful antidepressant, which often accompanies that, if they’ve had very serious medical procedures, these things can promote, enhance, accelerate mental disturbance, and we have to be very careful about it.
And when people act out violence, then we have to condemn it. If we don’t condemn it, we can’t deter it. And it’s no excuse that a person is transgender. None at all.
The same thing about homelessness. As soon as Iryna Zarutska was killed, the mayor of Charlotte, Vi Lyles, the first thing she said was: We don’t want to demonize the homeless. That was Decarlos Brown Jr. who murdered her.
And the same thing was true with Rashad Dabney. He murdered Julie Schnuelle, a retired Auburn professor of veterinary medicine. And he was homeless. They had another thing in common. Decarlos Brown had committed 14 felonies and he was out. Mr. Rashad Dabney should have been in jail for five to 10 years. He is charged with a felony and had recently been dropped, and he scot-free.
And so, when those stories came out, we were told, first of all, they were homeless. It doesn’t really matter. Then we were told that in the case of Decarlos Brown, and I’m referencing you, Van Jones, when you said the late Charlie Kirk should not have mentioned race in that case. He did not mention race himself. He didn’t bring up the topic.
He was replying, reacting to what? Something you didn’t say. That on the tape, if you listen very carefully, after he murders the young Ukrainian immigrant, Decarlos Brown said, “I got that white girl.” “I got that white girl,” as he walked out dripping with blood.
And so, what I’m getting at is, let’s not talk about the fact that we don’t want to demonize homeless people or trans people, or we don’t wanna mention race.
Remember, the Decarlos Brown story was suppressed by the media for days, weeks even, as was the Auburn murder, as was the manifesto. So, the society at large tries to massage these stories and, in some way, contextualize the violence. They don’t really talk about the victims who were butchered or killed, or the lives of their family and friends that are ruined.
And so, what are we to do about this? I think all we can do is restore sanity and say: We’re not going to worry about a person’s homeless status. Once he commits violence, we’re not gonna worry about their race. There’s not gonna be any exemption for that. We’re not gonna worry about their sexual orientation or whether they’re transitioning from one sex to another.
All we’re worried about, if you commit an act of violence and destroy an innocent person’s life, you’re going to face swift punishment—swift punishment if you are found guilty.
And we’re not going to consider all of the mitigating circumstances that this therapeutic society has bombed us with, and which prohibits fast and severe punishment for the guilty, who do what? They commit evil. And that’s the thing we’re worried about.
And a final thought: When Iryna was killed on the light rail, there were three people right across the aisle. And when they saw her collapse and she was looking at the ceiling, thinking, “I’m dying because a man just killed me for no reason. No one is helping me,” they each got up, solitarily walked right by her in her last gasp—did not offer a tourniquet, did not offer to help, did not call anybody.
I don’t know why they did that. Maybe they thought if they did something like Daniel Penny and tried to intervene and save a life that they might be prosecuted or they might, who knows, or they were cowardly.
But it’s the same idea that we don’t have any empathy for the victim, and if the victim doesn’t fit a particular status that we call victim, the real victim of a physical act of violence or murder or assault, but if they don’t fit a particular rubric as a victim that is based on their sexual orientation or their homeless status or their race, that we don’t really care about them. And that’s a stinging verdict on our collective immorality.
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