Compare!

A man slashed a woman’s throat in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the Democratic mayor released a statement expressing elaborate ritual sympathy for the poor, unhoused gentleman who was driven to this desperate act by the inadequacy of the government services that were available to him. Woman brutally murdered / “I want to be clear that I am not villainizing those who struggle with their mental health or those who are unhoused.” She said she didn’t fully understand the event yet because she hadn’t assessed the medical records of the poor man who stood up on a train and started carving up a stranger with a knife. See, if you really think about it, the dude with the knife was the true victim.

Now, look west. On Sept. 5, in San Jose, California, a violent robbery caused devastating harm to the elderly owner of a jewelry store. The Democratic mayor of San Jose responded like this:

This is appalling, it makes my blood boil, and we’re going to make arrests. “These people need to face the harshest possible consequences for their actions.”

That’s a sort of basic human response, isn’t it? They brutalized an elderly man to get some money, that’s disgusting, and I promise they’ll pay a price for that behavior. Zero ritual performance about those poor suffering souls who were driven to crime by society’s cruelty and the inadequacy of government services.

In many ways, Matt Mahan is an extremely conventional progressive politician, with a background that’s so typical you could invent it as parody. He met his wife at Harvard, and then he built a Facebook app called Causes and a voter network to save “our democracy,” while his wife worked as an associate at Skadden Arps and “produced social impact films.” Uh-huh. There’s an army of social justice entrepreneurs waiting to be the Democratic mayor of someplace, arm-in-arm with the spouse they met at [insert Ivy here].

But Mahan is also shrewd enough to sense the direction of the wind:

In an attack on the sociopathic governor of California, Mahan sounded a bunch of themes that California Democrats just… don’t. Stop being hostile to business, work on crime and disorder, lock up repeat offenders, and make cities cleaner and safer.

Matt Mahan sees that his party has lost the plot, and he’s a Democrat elected official who actually manages to sound like a human being. Is he a one-off, or a harbinger?

This article was originally published on the author’s Substack, “Tell Me How This Ends.”

Chris Bray is a former infantry sergeant in the U.S. Army, and has a history PhD from the University of California Los Angeles. Find his Substack, "Tell Me How This Ends," here.