Wednesday, October 16, 2024

Part I

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The Parable of George Gascón: Soft-On-Crime D.A. in LA Faces Looming Disaster of His Own Making on Election Day

The issue of crime and punishment is one of the most dramatic storylines in all of human history. It fills our literature, but it also fills our headlines, and that’s because we live in a fallen world and thus crime and punishment are absolutely relevant issues. They’re also controversial issues, and this is playing right into the 2024 campaign cycle, and that’s because, as you look at a couple of developments in the state of California, there are similar developments elsewhere, but the fact that this is happening, these two things, in California, it should certainly have our attention.

For one thing, you have the voters of California going to the ballot box on Election Day in order to decide whether or not they are going to basically revoke a proposition the voters put in place in 2014. That George Soros backed initiative was calling for a liberalization of crime laws. Basically, you’re looking at the question of crime and punishment, you decide that the crime is no longer worth or demanding of a more severe punishment, and so you adopt a more lenient understanding of the law. Prosecutors, judges, and others have to buy into this, but it is made particularly lawful when you have an initiative such as what was passed in California in 2014. It was known then as Proposition 47. Well, guess what? Here’s a big surprise. It has been a disaster. You look at all kinds of categories of crime, you reduce the punishments, guess what? You have more criminals. And so even as you had that movement back in 2014 arguing that society had overcrowded jails and all the rest, it turns out that once people understand that this leads to rising crime, they say, “We want the stricter laws back.”

As a result of the passage of Proposition 47 back in 2014, as the Wall Street Journal says what increased was vagrancy, open air drug use, and mental illness. “Organized crime rings plunder stores and freight trains with impunity.” On October the 4th, two dozen people ransacked a Nordstrom store west of Los Angeles that had been looted by another crew of mass thieves in August 2023. This article, which is actually an editorial column in the Wall Street Journal, says “violent crime has surged by some 35% since 2014, about four times as much as nationwide.” Now, crime has been going up around the country, including violent crime. Now, this requires a bit of explanation because maybe you’re hearing particularly among those who designate themselves as fact-checkers in the media and in the public square, they say, “That’s not true. Look at the FBI statistics.”

Yeah, well, the FBI statistics the FBI will have to answer for, but the fact is there are many in Congress who are saying that the FBI has re-categorized some issues so that they no longer count the way they once counted, which means it can look like violent crime is down, but you know what, the impression of Americans is not that. Americans do not believe that crime including violent crime is down. And thus you have a statistic like this just looking at the state of California, since 2014, violent crime up 35%. Okay, that’s very significant. So what’s also significant is that voters in California have the power to rescind Proposition 47 adopted in 2014 by adopting Proposition 36 in November. So it’s not so much that one proposition is repealed as much as a corrective proposition citizen action will be put into place, and it has binding authority.

If Proposition 36 passes shoplifters with two or more past convictions, well, their charge could be upgraded to a felony. And furthermore, you could have all kinds of sentences that are now increased rather than decreased, particularly as is related to organized crime, and that would include drug trafficking and any number of other crimes. Now, here’s what’s interesting. The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board said that, just last week, the University of California at Berkeley Institute of Governmental studies released a poll that showed voters favor Proposition 36, now get this, by a three-to-one margin. That is three-to-one. We’re not talking about overwhelming. We’re not talking about a mere majority. We’re talking about what amounts to a landslide here. You’re talking three-to-one.

These are the same voters, at least in some sense, they are the same voting population that, well, at least those who were voting back in 2014, voted for the previous initiative. So you might say that this has to be put in the category of lesson learned. Somehow a significant number, an adequate number, of Californians were convinced in 2014 that the law was too strict, but now they are running as fast as possible to correct that action with a radical imbalance here. Again, three-to-one, this initiative appears to be in the lead. But it’s not only this citizen initiative, this proposition. It is also a question that will be faced by the citizens of Los Angeles County where L.A. County District Attorney George Gascon is up for reelection. Okay, very interesting story here.

You go back to the original election of George Gascon. He was elected as a liberal prosecutor. Now, in one sense, those two words don’t go together. They’re something of an oxymoron in technical terms. Liberal prosecutor, just really doesn’t make sense. However, we’re talking about California. This isn’t limited, by the way, to California. It is extended mostly throughout the entire West Coast. Add Oregon and add Washington state to this. And there are some eastern jurisdictions, though fewer, tempted by the same kind of move. Let’s liberalize the prosecution office. Let’s elect a liberal prosecutor who is running on a platform of prosecuting fewer criminals. Well, let’s just ask the question, how has that turned out? I think you already know the answer. It has out so badly for this liberal District Attorney there in Los Angeles County that he is running behind by 30 points against a conservative challenger.

So once again, you have voters, the same voters, facing a question and what looked good to them just a few years ago is not looking so good now. Here’s what’s really interesting. You have the liberal press such as the Los Angeles Times, which by the way has endorsed George Gascon for re-election, so the Los Angeles Times is saying, “We need to put this man back in office. Even though all of these problems have appeared and his liberal approach to prosecution hasn’t worked, we need to put him back because we need to continue this experiment a bit longer.” But this is where citizens really don’t want to be lab rats in some kind of laboratory experiment, and when you look at how liberal politicians look at the political structure, that’s often exactly how they see it.

The voters in Los Angeles, at least those who are polled by this Berkeley organization, the University of California, they go on to say that, once again, they are expected to elect the challenger to George Gascon by a 30 point margin. And at this point, just three weeks before the election, a 30 point difference between support for the two candidates is almost by definition impossible to overcome. And so, one political scientist looking at this situation in California said, “If George Gascon pulls this out, you’re going to be talking about this election to your grandchildren.” One of my favorite parts about the Los Angeles Times coverage on this is that looking at this differential and basically trying to argue that the voters are unfair in making this judgment, one of the reports cites Roy Bear, identified as a political consultant for multiple Democrat campaigns across California, here’s what he said about the voters.

“Voters don’t know data. What they know are anecdotes. And over the last four years, there have been a massive number of televised anecdotes with store break-ins or other violent acts that have created the perception of crime run amuck.” Now, why do I think that’s so important? I think it’s important because there you have an academic saying, “The people really don’t know when crime’s going up or down. They should not trust their instincts. They should not trust their moral perception. They should not trust even, you might say, their own eyes and their own ears when it comes to understanding crime statistics. This is an unfair issue,” at least that’s implied according to this consultant. But I want to turn to an actual example of why the voters in Los Angeles County are turning on their District Attorney. And once again, all I have to do is look at the Los Angeles Times, the hometown newspaper.

A pair of reporters for that newspaper reports with a headline, “Gascon Gave Teen Killer a Second Chance and Now She’s Charged Again.” So let’s just look at the story. Here it is. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, October the 3rd, 2024, and I quote, “The crime Shanice Amanda Dyer committed as a 17-year-old was as horrific as it was seemingly random. She was a documented member of the Crips,” that’s a gang, “the Crips Street gang faction in South L.A. according to appellate records in the case, and she wanted to help retaliate for killings by a rival group in August 2019. “The targets the gang chose at random were an expectant father, Alfredo Carrera, and his close friend, Jose Antonio Flores Vasquez, an aspiring astrophysicist in UC, that’s the University of California, Irvine’s doctorate program, who was visiting Carrera to drop off a baby gift.”

Okay, there’s a lot of words, but you get the picture. This man is dropping off a baby gift. “A car pulled up with Dyer inside. After a brief argument, authorities said Dyer and two other defendants unleashed a volley of gunfire killing both men. A third man down the street was wounded in the back as he loaded his one-year-old daughter into a car seat.” Now get this, this is just further from the report, this is the young woman who was charged. According to the article, she “sent text messages taking responsibility for the shooting, saying she was satisfied it made headlines, according to a court of appeals filing that documented evidence gathered from her Instagram account.” So we’re talking here about open boasts about committing murder made by a teenage gang member and posted on social media for everyone to see.

We then read “Dyer was tried as a juvenile under Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon, who at the time had a strict policy against prosecuting teens as adults. She admitted to the murder charges in 2021 and probation records reviewed by the Times show she was released last February. Six months later, she was arrested in connection with another homicide, this one in Ramona.” Now, just so you understand, the Los Angeles Times doesn’t miss the point. Here are the next words. “Dyer’s case is one of several in which a defendant to whom Gascon showed leniency has been released only to be accused of another violent crime.” And so here you have a documented case of a prosecutor who decided not to try this older teenager of multiple murders as an adult, but rather to enter prosecution only under the juvenile system.

That’s a reflection of leniency in a way that I think is absolutely without any rational basis. And it turns out that this young woman, because she was tried as a juvenile on murder charges, she was found guilty and yet she’s back on the streets. And guess what? Within six months, she is back in connection with another murder. But in another telling development, a major ad by, in the campaign against the incumbent liberal District Attorney, it has been undertaken by a group known as the Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs. And as the paper says, it is a union for Deputy Sheriffs and District Attorney investigators in the county. You think that’s a coincidence? I’ll just say this. I don’t think you have to be a very good investigator to say, I think not.

All right, so in worldview terms, what do we learn from this? Well, one of the things we need to learn is that as God gave responsibility to civil government, and that’s really clear. A passage like Romans 13 in New Testament makes that very clear. We are told, for example, that the government, in this case, the emperor, does not hold or wield the sword in vain. And that’s about justice. That’s what the power of the sword is there. It’s about more than justice. It could be even in terms of, say, military service, but most importantly, it is a reference to justice. The responsibility which God gave to human government to limit evil and to prosecute wrongdoing. Crime and punishment is such an abundant theme throughout human literature, and, of course, even on television, movies, and all the rest, precisely because it is an inescapable fact of life and it is one of the most revealing moral issues of any civilization at any time until Jesus comes.

Part II

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It’s a Coastal Crisis With Big Warning Signs ‘Hopelessly Woke Legislators’ Have Crushed Major U.S. Cities

It’s also interesting to see that people from elsewhere are noting what’s going on in the United States. The Telegraph is one of the most influential British newspapers. How do you like this for a headline? “Progressives have destroyed the great cities of coastal America.” In the article, this writer telling the British readership about what’s going on in the United States says that America’s coastal cities have gone through cycles of change and she says that one of the reasons that these coastal cities became more attractive to people in recent decades was that, at least decades ago, they adopted “a much tougher approach to crime.” And she says those tougher approaches “turned the likes of New York and San Francisco into beacons of desirability.” And that’s exactly what happened. But this is where she writes, she says, “But years of democratic rule have destroyed the likes of New York and San Francisco, turning them into dystopias of anarchy, jamborees of unpunished violence, theft, and vandalism.”

Later she writes, “Meanwhile, in San Francisco, the crime, shoplifting, open drug taking, homelessness, and tent encampments that might once have been the necessary downside of a famously progressive dynamic city have consumed it.” And this particular writer understands that someone’s responsible for this. And thus, in the next sentence she writes, “Thereto, the problem is hopelessly woke legislators.” Now, every word in that sentence is important, but I think the two words put together, “hopelessly woke”, means a lot. But remember the next word is legislators and legislators are elected. So this is where voters have to understand that the election of legislators, of politicians, those who will hold political office at every level turns out cumulatively to be very important. Sometimes singularly it can be very important, as when you’re looking at someone like the Los Angeles County District Attorney.

But when it comes to the formation of the laws and the operation of government, those elected legislators at every level, they turn out to be very, very important, particularly when you consider which side, which argument has the majority. We’ve also tracked on The Briefing the fact that in some jurisdictions had actually chosen more lenient laws, very permissive laws concerning drug use. But in many of those, if not all those cases, they’re now reversing or trying to reverse those decisions. As Natalie Furtick of Politico tells us, she just reminds us, that back in 2020, you had in Portland, Oregon the passage of what was known as Measure 110 “decriminalizing all drugs”, which was backed by 74% of Multnomah County’s residents, “voters couldn’t or at least didn’t anticipate how this policy change would reshape a city already strapped for money dealing with a public health crisis and confronting rising rates of homelessness and fentanyl abuse.” The bottom line, by the way, is “drug use shot up, homelessness worsened, and taxpayers fled.”

Well, once again, as Christians look at this, we need to recognize that the law has the function of restraining evil. The law has the function biblically given of punishing the evildoer and the law also has the biblical function of teaching. So all three of those functions turn out to be important. And if you make drug use, just normalize it by permissive legislation, guess what? More people do it. And if it’s a problem, then you are buying a bigger problem by telling people there’s no problem using it. Now, as you look at the sociological data, it is clear that sometimes there are disproportionate impacts in certain communities, even certain ethnic designations when it comes to the prosecutions. But you also understand that it is some of the people in those same communities who are crying out saying, “This isn’t working,” because they’re paying the price of these liberal or woke policies.

But it is interesting just when we consider what we often talk about here, and that is the fact that progressivist policies become thicker on the ground the closer you get to a city, the closer you get to a coast, the closer you get to a campus. It’s not an accident that this headline in the British newspaper was “Progressives Have Destroyed the Great Cities of Coastal America.” Now, clearly not all of them, but disproportionately on the coast, and it’s true on the right coast, and it’s true on the left coast. It’s true on the Atlantic coast. It’s true on the Pacific coast. The closer you get to the coast, it is just a fact of life that in many cases you get closer to a more progressive vote and you get closer to progressive ideas.

Part III

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The Parable of Chicago’s Mayor: Entire School Board of Chicago Resigns in the Wake of Brandon Johnson Pandering to Teacher Unions

But frankly, as we’re thinking about this problem, we actually need to go to another city. This one is not on a seacoast, but it is a major political factor in the United States and actually with world significance. And that is the city of Chicago, a very interesting parable. A tale is unfolding, a morality story is unfolding there in the city of Chicago. The liberal mayor there is the Democrat Brandon Johnson, and he is very liberal. And you are talking in the city of Chicago, pretty much like you’re talking about the state of California. It is a Democratic Party enclave. The Democratic Party basically has a monopoly on political power. And in this case, what’s interesting is what’s happening within that circle. And within that circle, the interesting development in recent days is the fact that, in protest of the liberal mayor, the entire school board has, wait for it, resigned. Not some of them, not one of them, all of them.

So why are they resigning? Well, it is because the mayor is completely sold out to the liberal teachers unions. Now, in one sense, liberal teachers unions is another form of a redundancy. You just don’t need to say liberal teachers unions. If you have teachers unions, in the United States, they are overwhelmingly liberal. And frankly, it’s hard to exaggerate that. And if you doubt what I’m saying, simply look up the website to some of these teachers’ unions and see the positions they are demanding. Not only advocating, but demanding, and in the city of Chicago, which is a failing school district. Now, no doubt, let’s concede, it has grave challenges, but it is a failing school district, and I mean failing virtually in every conceivable way.

The teachers are demanding a massive pay raise that’s going to require a $300 million high interest loan to a broke school district. $300 million, that’s why the school board resigned, all of them, the entire board. All right, so at this point, even the very liberal city council in Chicago has indicated it’s outraged at this showdown and the fact that the entire school board has resigned in protest. But get this, here’s the way politics works in Chicago. Guess who gets to appoint the entire new school board? Oh, you got it. The very liberal mayor who caused the problem in the first place. He gets to appoint a new school board. And guess what? By coincidence, they’re going to agree with him. But you know what won’t go away? Well, it’s the problems there in the Chicago city schools. You know what else won’t go away? The money problem.

And what also appears not to go away virtually anywhere where you have this kind of conflict is the political power of the teacher’s unions. And I just want to point out, it is disproportionately allocated. So these teacher unions do not have much influence in the Republican Party because they don’t have anything to do with the Republican Party. But they are largely in the driver’s seat in the Democratic Party. At one recent Democratic National Convention, it was estimated that three out of four of those who were delegates to the convention were either members of a teacher’s union or directly in their family related to a member of the teacher’s union. There is no other union or series of unions in the United States that has nearly so much power.

And you need to understand that the real victims of this power play are not the members of the school board who resigned, they are the children trapped in that educational swamp.

Part IV

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From the Puritans to Magic Mushrooms? Massachusetts Weighs Legalization of Psychedelic Mushrooms

By the way, while we’re talking about all of this, let me just go back to California for a moment because I simply have to. Just in recent weeks, the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, has signed into law a measure that will create marijuana dispensaries in California which will be allowed to sell food, and they will also be able to serve non-alcoholic beverages. And as the New York Times reports, they will also be able to “host live events on their premises under the legislation.”

Okay, so here is the headline in the New York Times about this development in California, “California will allow Amsterdam like cannabis cafes.” Now, this Amsterdam is Amsterdam in the Netherlands, one of the most famously permissive liberal woke cities in the world, a city which basically has such a permissive understanding of morality that for decades, actually even longer than that, it was pretty much known for legalized prostitution. But it is now known for having these cannabis cafes where just about anything goes when it comes to the cannabis culture. And now California is going to do the same. Okay, you got to love the concern here. So a big concern was raised. Now, what would be the concern? What could go wrong here? Well, just listen to this sentence. “Last year, Governor Newsom vetoed a previous version of the bill concerned that it would undermine the state’s smoke-free workplace protections.”

Oh, so that’s the big issue. The big issue here isn’t the use of mind-altering drugs. It’s not the development of a drug culture. It’s not the permissive sense in which the culture will be represented by cannabis cafes. It was the fact that they would be in these cannabis cafes, oh, I don’t know, they would be smoking cannabis, of all things. And it’s that part that turns out to be the offense in the eyes of the Governor. But I think right now there’s some people who are saying, “You’re just being too rough on California.” And that might be true because it’s not just about California. How do you like this? Voters in Massachusetts go all the way across the country, all the way to the northeast. Voters in Massachusetts are going to be voting on whether or not to legalize, wait for it, magic mushrooms. Now, I know this seems like a fairy tale. It is actually true. We’re talking about hallucinogenic mushrooms and whether or not they’re going to be made legal in terms of the use of these mushrooms in the state of Massachusetts.

Remember that Massachusetts was basically a Puritan colony. Well, let’s just say the Puritans didn’t sit around taking in magic mushrooms. But here’s where you need to notice. There’s some really interesting developments here. It’s almost like the 1960s are re-exploding among us and the hippies are breaking out with new legislation. Listen to this, “Advocates have long claimed it,” that means this question four in Massachusetts, which would permit adults to grow, possess, and use psychedelic mushrooms, “it will create regulated therapeutic access to natural psychedelic medicines.” So here’s the deal. Here’s the deal. These are good psychedelic substances because they’re organic and they’re natural. They are, after all, not something you buy from a pusher in a vial. No, this is actually grown out in the woods, a magic mushroom.

Charles Payne Layman writing in the Wall Street Journal tells us, “Question four, envisages a highly permissive regime. Bay Staters could home-gross psychedelics in plots as large as 12 square feet, possess relatively large amounts, and give the drugs to others. Cities and towns would be allowed to restrict the time, place, and manner of sales, but not to ban them outright.” The opinion commentary in the journal suggests that Massachusetts voters should just vote no. But you know, that just makes too much sense because when you’re looking at a story like this, you realize that this kind of initiative, it doesn’t get before voters by accident. Evidently, there is a sizable constituency for magic mushrooms, the growth, the possession, and the use thereof.

Meanwhile, you had the situation even with the legalization of marijuana or cannabis in some jurisdictions where people are beginning to wonder, “Wait just a minute. Did we do this too fast? I mean, after all, it doesn’t appear to be without the problems many warned there would be.” And then again, maybe those who are behind all this kind of thing would just look at the problems with, say, legalized marijuana and say, “We’ll just get over it by, oh, I don’t know, going out in the field with a magic mushroom.” Well, no magic and no mushrooms here.