Democrats evince as much or more sympathy for Decarlos Brown Jr. as they do for Iryna Zarutska.
This is not one of those “there they go again” moments. If the public’s patience with the moral equivalences and abstractions marshaled by those who want nothing more than to avoid confronting the challenges before them wasn’t exhausted before, it should be now. And at some level, the progressive activist class must sense that the national mood has shifted under their feet. But old habits die hard. Thus, we are still privy to efforts by softhearted liberals to explain, if not excuse, the inexplicable and inexcusable.
NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck flagged one disturbing example of this phenomenon during a CBS Mornings Plus segment this week in which the hosts posited that Decarlos Brown Jr., the man who allegedly knifed Iryna Zarutska to death, was as much a victim as anyone. In sum, Brown was underserved by public malinvestments, and he is, therefore, a product of the real malefactor in this story: you and me.
Have we “done the work to try to rehabilitate” convicted criminals? Did we throw sufficient gobs of taxpayer funds at the problems of recidivism and mental illness? Aren’t we really to blame for this?
In truth, Zarutska’s murder is a story of state failure, but Brown is not the victim. He had been arrested and institutionalized more than a dozen times. He spent five years in jail before returning home to his mother, who kicked Brown out of her house after he experienced bouts of manic aggression and exhibited signs of mental illness. “He started saying that he wasn’t in his body,” she mourned in an interview. “The system failed him.”
Naturally, Newsweek reporters took this as a jumping-off point to echo CBS’s anchors’ lament. The mental health system is “broken,” said retired North Carolina judge Kimberly Best. “If we don’t put the money in the front, we’re definitely going to have to put the money in the back end.”
But Brown was not left to his own devices because the apparatuses of the state are starved of cash. “He also has a schizophrenia diagnosis, and has behaved so alarmingly, including assaulting his sister, that his own mother had him involuntarily committed, and then, when he was released, ejected from the family home,” City Journal’s Nicole Gelinas wrote. “During a check on his health this past January, Brown called the police on the police. In that case, instead of acting on the obvious danger of a person with a propensity toward violence suffering from delusions, a Charlotte judge released him on his own recognizance.”
The fact that Brown lacked the presence of mind to report to court when he was ordered to, or take the medication that would help him control his manic episodes, is neither your fault nor mine. The difficulty associated with involuntarily committing the mentally infirm to the institutions that once kept them and us safe is not a fact of nature with which we have to make our peace. It is the result of public policy choices, and Brown is not their primary victim here. Zarutska was. So are we.
That should be obvious now. But some cannot help but stick to the script. As CNN personality Van Jones emoted, “we don’t know how to deal with people who are hurting in the way this man was hurting.” Indeed, “hurt people hurt people.” He went on to castigate right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk, who had asserted that the racial dynamics in this case were as, if not more, important than the suspect’s mental health issues. “He should be ashamed of himself,” Jones said. Somehow, the perennial panelist managed to summon more hostility toward Kirk (who was reportedly the victim in a targeted shooting on Wednesday) than he mustered for the alleged schizophrenic murderer.
All this misplaced emotion on the alleged killer’s behalf is not the result of America’s failure to cordon off the violently mentally ill from the rest of society. That impulse begat those circumstances, which so many Americans have earned the right to resent. In inverting the roles of victim and victimizer merely to place the blame for Brown’s crimes on the innocent shoulders of an amorphous and therefore blameless thing called society, the left twists itself into cognitive knots. These arguments sound foreign — all but alien — to those of us who expect the state to create and preserve the fundamental conditions in which the general public welfare flourishes.
In an anarchic environment, it would be the responsibility of the people on that bus to neutralize the looming, erratic threat in the back seat. That is what Daniel Penny did, along with the assistance of three of his fellow subway riders — an act that resulted in his failed prosecution and an outpouring of misplaced progressive sympathy for his tormentor. Because we live in a society in which the state maintains a legal monopoly on force, it is the role of the state and its appendages to intervene preemptively. When the state fails in that charge, it represents a violation of the social contract. Progressives, for whom the social contract is not expansive enough, are nevertheless presiding over its fraying — and only, it seems, to demonstrate the immense depth of their capacity for empathy.
They don’t seem to see how their performance detracts from their cause. Casual observers could conclude from these displays of sympathy for those who commit demonic acts that they are on their own — at least if they reside in Democratic municipalities. And when Democrats evince as much or more sympathy for a killer as they do for his victim, who can blame these observers? They’re right.