Deflecting Reality With Ritual Invocation

status signaling through gaslighting the rubes in flyover country

Deep thoughts from a political science professor at the University of Illinois:

Yes, the problem is that all these FOX NEWS-watching MORONS believe “lies that DAs don’t prosecute.” It’s just a stupid far-right talking point, you idiots.

Meanwhile, here’s a report from 2021 on the declination policies at the Manhattan DA’s office, available on the website of the DA’s office itself. Nut graf:

In 2014, the year before the Office’s signature diversion initiatives went into effect, the Manhattan D.A.’s Office arraigned 96,402 cases, more than 16,000 of which (17%) would have been declined under present-day Office policies. In 2019, just five years later, the Office arraigned only 41,791 cases – a 57% decrease. In 2020, due to disruptions in case processing caused by the impact of COVID-19 on court functions, the number of cases prosecuted fell again to 20,245 – a 79% reduction from 2014.

So 96,402 cases filed in 2014, 20,2345 cases filed in 2020, according to the DA’s office itself. The title of that report is an open description of intent: “Reducing the Criminal Justice Footprint in Manhattan.” But it’s just a far-right media talking point that DAs are doing the very thing that they directly and explicitly tell you they’re doing. Like so many others of his midwit status group, Nicholas Grossman is a brutally stupid fool, a smug idiot who doesn’t know anything but speaks with complete confidence. These people are everywhere, and they’re worse than worthless.

Here’s a more recent report from the other side of the country, the 2023 mid-term report from the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. It describes the DA’s aggressive misdemeanor declination policy, the decision to refuse to seek the death penalty, the DA’s opposition to the state’s three strikes law, the DA’s commitment to “diversion and restorative justice” as an alternative to prosecution, the DA’s refusal to use sentencing enhancements, and so on. The Los Angeles County DA has defined a wide range of misdemeanors as "addiction-related” crimes, refusing to prosecute them. You can find this chart on page 4, in a report published by the district attorney:

I can’t find one piece of evidence that DAs don’t prosecute, can you? It must be a FOX NEWS TALKING POINT.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is working to close the county’s largest jail, while two of the five supervisors have tried — against considerable opposition — to pivot to a general emptying of the county’s jail system. Explicitly moving from a criminal justice model to a restorative justice model, the county has assigned violence reduction to the Public Health Department, which has a team of epidemiologists assigned to the problem. That office released their gun violence strategy document this month; you can read it for yourself here. Sample strategy from page 4:

Art therapy and drum circles.

There are arguments for decarceration and different approaches to social disorder, and a debate to be had over the limits and consequences of those choices. We’re mostly not having any of those debates, because of the ritual strategies of the people Christopher Lasch described as a self-conscious new elite, endlessly chanting their status by sneering at the poors. My God is it tedious.