On Tuesday night, DC residents gathered to lament the state of their city.
“We are mad. We are scared in this community. There was a murder in our building just 10 days ago. A woman was shot in the face across the street on Saturday,” one resident told D.C. police Chief Pamela Smith at Tuesday’s town hall.
Smith did her best to respond to these frustrations, but real culprits — champagne race-baiters like Ibram X. Kendi and Patrisse Cullors — were nowhere to be found. Their ideas, however, are painfully present in the daily lives of Washingtonians.
In the capital of the most powerful nation the world has ever known, violent crime is up 38 percent in just one year. Gun violence breaks out in front of upscale restaurants. Eighty-five-thousand people in the city’s poorest ward are about to lose their only grocery store due to unrestrained retail theft. Police gave up on stopping carjackers and started handing out free steering wheel locks instead.
And why? Partly because Black Lives Matter riots in major cities had a chilling effect on recruitment and policing. The result has been some 3,000 additional murders over a seven-year period, one study found. In D.C. alone, there is a shortfall of around 400 officers, and no wonder. Who wants to be a cop in a city that rewards church-burning rioters by naming a street after them? (RELATED: Watchdog Reveals How Much DC Is Spending To Refresh BLM Mural As Violent Crime Surges)
DC’s mayor says nation’s capital is up to 400 cops short and “we have policies that make it difficult to recruit new officers.”pic.twitter.com/Qz0hIrrrd3
— Lucas Tomlinson (@LucasFoxNews) October 3, 2023
In addition to creating these problems, the prophets of systemic racism have also made it nearly impossible to solve them. The D.C. council’s solution to this crime wave was to reduce the punishments for carjackings and robberies.
When Chicago and Los Angeles had the opportunity to elect pro-police mayors, they doubled down on BLM resentment politics instead. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson immediately set about rebranding teenage looting mobs as “large gatherings.” The idea of doing something to stop those mobs — which drive taxpaying, job-creating businesses out of the city — would never occur to him. That would be racist.
Imagine being lectured by a guy who thinks “mob action” has anything to do with Al Capone. pic.twitter.com/SX2cYNIIzm
— 16th & 17th District Chicago Police Scanner (@CPD1617Scanner) August 2, 2023
No matter who you are, this ideology has probably made your life measurably worse.
Are you an affluent white woman out for a nice city walk in your Canada Goose jacket? Or a Brooklyn hipster on your way home from a wedding? You may well find yourself robbed at gunpoint or stabbed to death in front of your girlfriend.
If you’re a poor black woman in Southeast D.C., then congratulations! You now live in a crime-ridden food desert. Isn’t life grand without all that “overpolicing”?
Maybe you’re an Indian-American family living in a Connecticut suburb, far from the chaos of the inner cities. Sorry, there’s still no escape. They’ll punish your daughter for outperforming her classmates “of color,” or maybe cancel her honors classes altogether. Even families in small-town Oklahoma aren’t safe from blue-haired teachers who want nothing more than to privilege-walk their sons down the hallways until they hate themselves, their families and their country.
Are you a law student excited to hear a prominent federal judge speak on your campus? Too bad. Your classmates, who’ve spent the last few years huffing uncut CRT, can shout the speaker down while a highly paid administrator eggs them on. (RELATED: Federal Judges Won’t Hire Clerks From Stanford Law After Students Shouted Down Federal Judge)
Even major corporations are suffering. Target is so afraid of the next George Floyd dying in its aisles with some chicken thighs stuffed down his pants that it’s allegedly preventing law enforcement from arresting shoplifters in stores. And that’s despite retail theft topping $1 billion for the company this year and forcing nine stores to close. Rough deal for the employees too.
But maybe you’re just a regular guy who believes in fairness and wants things to work like they’re supposed to. You think planes should be flown by the sharpest pilots, troops commanded by the ablest officers, Oscars awarded to the best movies, professorships and grants directed to the most promising candidates and so on. Sorry. Every organization, in addition to its stated purpose, now has an overriding trinity of metapurposes: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
The FAA exists not to ensure safe air travel, but to promote diversity. The military’s primary objective is to maximize equity, not warfighting capacity. The Academy Awards declare dogmatically that there can be no artistic excellence without full inclusion. Awards and positions flow not to the best qualified, but to those who can most eloquently restate the DEI Creed. (RELATED: Entire University System To No Longer Require ‘Diversity Statements’ From Applicants)
Everything is like this now. And as a result, everything is worse.
The only real beneficiaries (other than shoplifters) are the priests and priestesses of the anti-racism cult. Kendi got to rake in millions of dollars for a Center for Antiracist Research that published jack shit. Cullors ended up with a $6 million party mansion. Colin Kaepernik compared the NFL to slavery, making him the only slave in history with a seven-figure sneaker deal. Regina Jackson and Saira Rao, a particularly entrepreneurial pair of anti-racist educators, charged white women $5,000 a pop to call them racist and then yell at them for crying about it.
An excerpt from the book White Women by Regina Jackson and Saida Rao. This was from a Race2Dinner conversation. I love that we have a tangible example of “the urgency of brunch” now. Also Regina’s response was awesome pic.twitter.com/i8dkgDd4h6
— Holly Jolly MerBear 🍉 (@WittyVitale) November 27, 2023
And, of course, there are all the university diversicrats, HR harpies and roving DEI educators whose names we don’t know but who are raking in cushy salaries with full benefits for their work as full-time crybullies.
The results are in: Black Lives Matter has been an unqualified disaster across every stratum of American society. Everyone has suffered, except for a small handful of grifting opportunists. The wave may be rolling back in some places, but it won’t roll back all the way. Even if it did, the damage is already done.
Grayson Quay is an editor at the Daily Caller.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.