Joel Hilary (4:56)
The only thing that you don't want to change is the behavior of criminals. Now, before the fact checkers jump down my throat, I'll emphasize one thing, which is that this rebrand doesn't apply to everyone who commits crimes in the state of Illinois. Instead, this new term applies to men and women in the state's Adult Redeploy Illinois program, or ARI, as you heard. According to the government of McLean County, Illinois, the ARA program provides for comprehensive daily supervision of dozens of, quote, high risk adult felons as an alternative to costly penitentiary commitment. So they're not rebranding every criminal as a justice impacted individual. They're only rebranding some of the high risk adult felons who otherwise would be in prison. So if you're living in Chicago, hopefully you can rest easy tonight with that distinction in mind. Now, the point of the word game here is the same as always. First, it removes agency from the individual by making terminology as passive as possible. An offender is not an offender anymore because offending is something that a person actively does, right? It puts the onus on the individual. You have gone out and offended, you've committed an offense, and instead they're saying, well, they're justice impacted. They were impacted by justice. It's not their fault. You know, justice came along and impacted them. I mean, they're the victims here, if anything. And second, on top of making everything passive and removing agency, it also helps to identify the people that are in your club because they're the ones who know about these lingo changes and follow the rules. So it's not much different from a child who sets up a pillow fort and won't let you inside the fort unless you know the password, which changes randomly and on a whim. It's like that kind of idea. Now, if you go looking online for the term justice impacted individual, you'll find that it's popular among Harvard podcasters, billionaire left wing activists, giant Silicon Valley corporations like Google. These are the people and organizations that conveniently enough, have distanced themselves as much as possible from communities where crime is high. So they don't want anything to do with the justice impacted individuals, but they want you to have to live near them and treat them with respect and even refer to them in a way that you know will not be alienating or otherizing for them. Of course, nobody in the real world uses terms like justice impacted individuals, which is precisely the point. If you go around saying the word justice impacted individual, then you're instantly communicating where you stand on the political spectrum, and perhaps more importantly, people who don't use these new terms are instantly identifiable as outcasts, as racists and terrible people. Every so often, wealthy elites and academics come up with new ways to provide these kinds of signals, and then they inevitably filter down to activists and government bureaucrats, which is what's happening right now in Illinois. Which is also why, by the way, this may be the first time you're hearing of justice impacted individual. Give it like a year or six months and you'll be hearing it everywhere. That's the way this always goes. Now, there was an episode during the Canadian trucker convoy a couple of years ago that illustrates how this strategy works in practice. The truckers who gathered in the Canadian capital city of Ottawa were exactly the kind of blue collar workers that liberals pretend to care about. But in this case, the blue collar workers were protesting for, you know, freedom. So they had to be crushed. It was vitally important for liberals to smear these truckers as racist. And one of the ways the liberals did that was by criticizing the truckers for using the wrong lingo. This is a clip from a Fox interview that leftists mocked relentlessly during the convoy. And listen to it and see if you can spot what they considered the problem to be. Listen. It was only one guy. So we are not racist. I have all type of friends, colored friends, Spanish, Chinese, you know, they are great people. There is no racism here. So they're actually. Then there's, you know, this is a Romanian truck who clearly speaks English as a second language, and he's explaining on primetime television that he's not racist because he has a bunch of colored friends. Now, logically, there's no difference whatsoever between saying, I have colored friends and I have friends who are people of color. It's just a slight grammatical difference that means absolutely nothing. It's all semantics. If anything, the latter sentence is unnecessarily wordy, otherwise they're the same. If a person can be of color, then it's accurate to say that the person is colored. A person of color is a colored person. But your intellectual superiors have decided, for reasons that cannot be explained, they've just decided that people of color is the only phrase you're allowed to use. If you say colored people, unless you're the naacp, you're a bigot. So they vilified this trucker all over social media, both here and in Canada. And on top of that, too, not only did he use the lingo or did he use the wrong lingo, but he also tried to disprove accusations of racism by saying that he has black friends. And we're also told by our betters that doesn't prove anything, when of course it absolutely does. Like, if you have friends of a particular race, it's a pretty good indication that you're not racist against that race. But this is one of the main reasons that cutting edge PC lingo exists. It's why you're supposed to say people experiencing homelessness instead of homeless drug addict. It's why you're supposed to say minor attracted person instead of pedophile. And it's why, if at all possible, you're supposed to employ clever euphemisms to describe criminals who happen to be really any race but white. The New York Post is particularly adept at this last trick, to the point that it's becoming a running joke online and presumably in the Post newsroom. Among the euphemisms that New York Post has come up with to describe black suspects are cold hearted teens, knife wielding sicko, misogynistic maniac, and my personal favorite, Lunchtime rowdies. Now, just in case there is any doubt that the Post is doing this deliberately, here's a passage from that article on the lunchtime rowdies. See if you can count all the euphemisms. Here it is, and this is totally real. A band of foul mouthed, toy gun waving, pot puffing high school hooligans are keeping Residents of West 13th off 6th Avenue hostage in their own tony homes for at least a year while school is in session. The Roughnecks roam from stoop to stoop every day at lunchtime, rolling blunts, getting high, acting out and taunting anyone who gets in their way. Now, with terms like hooligans, roughnecks, lunchtime rowdies, you'd be forgiven for thinking that this is like an article from a small town newspaper somewhere out in Wyoming in the year 1873. My only hope is that in the next Post article they can work in the terms ruffian and scoundrel. But in any case, you read the whole article and you won't find any mention in the text about the ethnicity of these lunchtime rowdies and pot puffing hooligans. But if a white person is causing problems, the Post will generally put the race in the headline. For example, one recent headline in the Post read Video Shows Black NYC Partiers Scatter for Cover as White neighbor Douses Them with Garden Hose. Now there was no euphemism for the white guy. He wasn't a hose toting scoundrel or anything like that. He's just a white neighbor. And for what it's worth, not all the people he hit with the water were black. The Post went out of its way to mention the race of the white guy, even when it was misleading to do so. Of course, this isn't specific to the New York Post. It's the approach of most major media outlets. As the account data Hazard found, the race of white murderers is made clear in more than 90% of news articles. But with black murderers, race is only mentioned in 30% of the article of the articles. And when it does appear, it's usually much lower down in the text of the article. So this is obviously a very intentional thing that they're doing. And journalists do this in part to signal that they're true believers in principles of restorative justice. In the process, they're denying the agency of black offenders by holding them to a completely different standard. These criminals get additional protections in the media even when they commit heinous crimes solely on the basis of their skin color. And now the state of Illinois is doing the same thing. It's almost as if they hired the New York Post euphemism guy to write their legislation. Now, to give the left some credit, they understand the role of language in shaping policy and shaping opinions and the views of the public. In order to normalize crime and pedophilia, they first need to change the way people refer to crime and pedophilia. And that effort is now underway in Illinois, which means that many more justice impacted individuals will soon be out on the streets. It also means that many more innocent people, including children and pregnant women, will be impacted by these justice impacted individuals. Because one euphemism at a time in Democrat run cities all over the country, it's pretty clear that that's the point. History, economics, literature, the Constitution. Did you actually study these in school? Probably not. Or you got some watered down version that missed the point entirely. Time and technology have changed a lot of things, but they have not changed basic fundamental truths about the world, our country, and our place in it. That's why I want to share something I think you'd find valuable. Hillsdale College is offering more than 40 free online courses that cover everything from C.S. lewis and Genesis to the Roman Republic and early Christian history. I've been really enjoying their Constitution 101 course, which dives deep into design and purpose of our Constitution, the challenges it faced during the Civil War, and how it's been undermined over the past century by progressive and liberal ideologies. The course is completely self paced with 12 lectures, so you can start whenever works for you. Honestly, I believe our country desperately needs more Americans who truly understand the Constitution and can stand up to our freedoms and freedoms against an increasingly large and unaccountable government. If you care about preserving what makes America great, I'd encourage you to check out this free Constitution 101 course. It's a great eye opener to how much we've drifted from our founding principles. Go right now to Hillsdale. Edu Walsh to enroll. There's no cost. It's easy to get started. That's Hillsdale. Edu Walsh to enroll for free Hillsdale. Edu Walsh. We've talked a lot on the show about the collapse of the criminal justice system. The very concept of criminal justice, of enacting justice and punishing crime, has been destroyed. But very few people ever take the time to trace the roots of our current state of lawlessness back to its origins. And the thing is, you don't need to trace the roots very far. At least maybe not all the way back to its very origins, because you have to go all the way back to the fall of man. But you could go back only a few years and starts to tell you the story of how we ended up where we are now. There's a reason why we now live in a country governed by people who don't believe in simply enforcing the law and punishing lawbreakers. These are people who are operating according to certain particularly crazy beliefs. And one of those beliefs, as we briefly talked about yesterday, is that deterrence doesn't exist effectively. You cannot deter crime by punishing it. That's the insane idea that began in our institutions of higher learning, the sort of insane idea that can only begin in those institutions and filtered its way down from there, as these ideas always do. Now, it began with the claim first made years ago that the death penalty doesn't deter crime. You're probably familiar with this, you've heard it before, and now this claim is always false for reasons we'll touch on later. But whatever you think of the death penalty, the implication underlying the deterrence argument was never gonna stop at the death penalty. It was always gonna go far beyond that. And indeed, we've seen that progression in recent years. It's no longer, well, the death penalty is pointless because people don't consider those consequences when they commit crime. Instead, the argument we're hearing today is all harsh punishment is pointless because people don't consider any consequences when they commit crime. This is the intellectual origin of the soft on crime approach to law enforcement that we're seeing in every major American city in the country right now. And several years ago, this approach was adopted by the Obama DOJ without any fanfare whatsoever. In May of 2016, the National Institute of Justice, which is the research arm of the doj, published a document entitled five Things about Deterrence. You've almost certainly never heard of this document, but it is essentially the modern manifesto of the anti incarceration movement in the United States. It applies the reasoning of anti death penalty advocates to all forms of crime and to all punishment. So for that reason, it's a truly remarkable document that even though you haven't heard of, you should. So we're gonna go through it today. Here are the five things about deterrence that the memo highlights and then expands upon. Number one, the certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than than the punishment. In other words, according to the doj, criminals are primarily worried about whether the cops are going to arrest them. They're not worried about how long they're gonna have to stay in prison. The only thing they care about is whether or not they're gonna get arrested. The question that apparently never occurred to the DOJ is if the punishments aren't severe, then why would the certainty of being caught deter anyone? Why would criminals care if they're gonna be caught if they know ahead of time they won't be punished? The whole reason that being caught is scary is that you will be punished. But if you aren't going to be punished, then being caught is not a scary prospect anymore. Again, we're seeing this play out in cities across the country. Sure, the criminals are caught sometimes, but it doesn't matter to them because they aren't punished and they're back on the street a day later committing more crimes. So the argument from the DoJ, which is the very first thing on the memo, all that matters is whether you catch them. It doesn't matter whether you punish them. This is what the DOJ is saying. And it's like saying that home invaders are deterred by guns. But it doesn't matter if it's a Glock or a Super Soaker, just as long as it's a gun. That's all that matters. Will it kill them? Will it make them a little wet? That doesn't, that's not factored in. It makes no sense. The DOJ's manifesto doesn't bother to expand on this point in any way. It just says, quote, research shows clearly that the chance of being caught is a Vastly more effective deterrent than even draconian punishment. So there you have it. Research shows that punishment doesn't work. Research? What kind of research? Well, they don't say, at least not in that paragraph. Buried in the fine print on the page is a citation to an article by a public policy professor named Daniel Nagin at Carnegie Mellon University. Now, this is the primary paper the DOJ relies on, along with a couple of others. Apparently, Nagin has done the research and he's realized the criminals don't really care about punishment. They only care about being caught. But whether or not they're punished after being caught, they don't care about that. I looked around to see if Nagin actually thinks this and if so, what his logic is. I came across this clip from many years ago, which I'm gonna play primarily because it's kind of hilarious. I want you to watch as a local news team breaks the news that according to Daniel Nagin's first groundbre ranking finding, when you have more police officers, criminals tend to commit less crime. The news station interviews then a couple of random people who say that, you know, that pretty much checks out. This is one of the best examples of research telling us something that's incredibly obvious to a comical degree. But buried in this report, if you listen carefully, is Nagin's second theory, which the DOJ finds so compelling. Watch now.
