Backing underdogs in sport is OK, but the Left’s support for the weak in the real world has led to a crimewave across the US

The chaos engulfing many American cities can be attributed to progressives’ natural desire to try to balance life’s inequities by overlooking criminality. As we are finding out, this is a dangerous path to follow.

It’s tied after extra time. On one side, it’s Real Madrid, Bayern München or Chelsea. Across the pitch, it’s Malaga, Nurnberg or Watford. Your favorite team doesn’t have any skin in the game, so you root for the little guy for novelty’s sake.

It’s game seven of the World Series, tied in the bottom of the ninth. Bases loaded. Two out. The count is 3-2. Up to bat, the small market Milwaukee Brewers or Pittsburgh Pirates need a single run to win the World Championship over the New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox. Wouldn’t it feed your spirit to see the underfunded and the outmanned steal a banner away from the money-soaked dynasties?

Whether you’re kicking back in the world of sports or watching Luke Skywalker or Neo take on Darth Vader or The Matrix, you have to stand a long way toward heartless not to root for the underdog. Unfortunately, many amidst the hard left and ‘first level thinking’ congregation believe that governments and other institutions should be run by the same woolly rules. The result is a systematic breakdown of the basic tenets of civilized human society.

As a quick reminder for the uninitiated, ‘first level thinking’ refers to the simple, intellectually bankrupt process of believing: ‘If a thought or a solution feels good, it should be believed or implemented immediately.’ Obviously, such a philosophy allows for no consideration of further developments or result analysis. Worse, there’s no understanding of the darkest law of unintended consequences.

That traipsing mindset in effect, its adherents devote themselves almost exclusively to culture’s underdogs. The stronger entity is always wrong (or outright evil), while any individual or group in the weaker position is honorable and worthy of endless defense. Sadly, for these doe-eyed, hopeful, yet fanatical cultists, the stronger or more powerful throughout the world are often in that position because of cultural character or more effective functional practices.

We’re seeing the disastrous outcomes of putting this weak > strong certainty into practice in several American cities today. The world witnessed the nightmarish application of excessive authority exercised by a sadistic sociopath hiding behind a badge in Minneapolis last summer. Rather than view that event as a crime that deserved to be (and was) prosecuted to the full extent of the law, the media and progressive institutions forged the collective message that all police were corrupt because of their stronger, more powerful position – while the criminals they pursue and arrest deserved compassion and understanding due to their weaker, often impoverished state.

Now, a year later, cities from New York to Los Angeles either cut police funding or failed to raise it keeping with annual increases. A simple perusal of online crime statistics shows the unavoidable results.

Homicide and violent crime rates are soaring this summer. The clearest examples come to us from California where this ‘weaker rules’ worldview reigns supreme and has for decades. Major national companies like Walgreens are abandoning San Francisco because local governments refuse to prosecute thieves.

It never occurred to these Fog City officials that, if you allow petty criminals to walk out of stores with thousands of dollars in merchandise regularly without consequence, stores might just pack up and leave paying customers with nowhere to shop.

Still, the progressive view runs along the lines of ‘…If you need to steal to get what you want, go ahead. It’s not fair that you can’t afford everything you want. It can’t be because you failed to apply yourself at any or all stages of your life – or because you refuse to develop or apply the character of more stable people.’ Weaker > stronger.

Many of those walk-up and walk-out thieves are members of the state’s massive and constantly growing homeless population. At first glance, there are no greater underdogs anywhere than those without a roof over their heads. So, California threw open its golden gates to America’s thousands of mentally ill and addicted – along with the growing population of men and women who simply prefer living off the grid to working.

Ignoring the messages of their frontal lobes, Californians claim any judgements passed on those homeless that might lead authorities to arrest them, clean them up, detox them or free up the public spaces they consume are abusive and unfair.

The state now holds more than 160,000 vagrants, more than a quarter of the national total. They’re stealing from the citizenry. They’re killing each other.  In Los Angeles, they’re responsible for more than half of the city’s fires.

As we harken back to those words ‘law of unintended consequences…’, we stay in Los Angeles, where a citywide effort is underway to undo the idiotic disaster that was the election of District Attorney George Gascon. Riding into office on the surge of outrage that followed the George Floyd tragedy, Gascon immediately restricted and crippled LA’s mechanism for convicting and incarcerating dangerous criminals.

With a recall effort underway to remove this tyrannical DA, Gascon repeatedly cites racism as the reason he prevents his prosecutors from pursuing complete cases against violent thieves and murderers. In Gascon’s self-serving, ideological delusion, the fact that racial minorities make up a high number of LA’s criminal ranks means the criminal justice system is racist. The additional fact that these criminals turn to crime because of economic woes further weakens their status and prestige. Therefore, not prosecuting criminals is the all-purpose path to racial justice and economic balance.

This theory never answers this question: If racial identity or lower financial status makes criminal actions necessary or even unavoidable, why are there millions of people amidst those classifications living effective, proud, honest and constructive lives?

There are similar law enforcement plans playing out in other cities such as Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Austin and Milwaukee. Of course, the agony growing from this plan to punish police and prosecutors is the men and women committing crimes aren’t really invested in some pseudo-intellectual pursuit of comfy social justice. They’re too busy committing murders, armed robberies or assaults. It never occurs to these activists masquerading as law enforcement professionals that the ‘underdogs’ they’re so eager to free and enable are really more interested in harming innocent victims than participating in any grand socio-political experiment.

The real victims of all this progressive obsession on balancing life’s inequities are the responsible, productive members of the public – those in the ‘stronger’ position the crusaders loathe so passionately and publicly. By following the law, educating themselves, working their jobs, raising their families, etc., they’re not of interest to the kings and queens of artificially balancing the books.

If they get hurt by a criminal who only needed one more chance or can’t find a police officer to protect their children, they’ve got it coming for not having the good sense to weaken their place in society with a sound commitment to greed, illiteracy, violence and a lack of compassion. Evidently, those are the sort of people the dedicated progressive wants to save.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.