By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, September 10, 2025
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.
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