Karmelo Anthony—his first name sounds like some off-brand 99 Cent Store nougat confection—is going to prison for 35 years, and he is relatively lucky. He is lucky he does not live in a society that treats monsters appropriately. A civilized society does not tolerate his brand of sociopathy. It executes such criminals—not only as righteous retribution and not only as an example to others, but as an act of societal hygiene. For a millennium, Europe hanged, beheaded, or otherwise dispatched about 1 percent of its male population every year for various crimes, and you know what? After a while, there were not that many more criminals left. European society was remarkably peaceful as far as crime, if not as far as war. But we moderns decided to go another way. We decided this was too harsh. We decided this was too mean. So, we decided to tolerate nonsense, and it is no surprise what has happened. The kindness to criminals has, inevitably, turned into cruelty to the innocent.
But the defenders of this kind of moral illiteracy are shameless, and in the wake of Karmelo Anthony’s just conviction, they have been not just stupid but loud. We have been bombarded by outright evil attempting to excuse his crime. They advocate special rules for black men that everybody else must honor, which involves letting them misbehave but never confronting them about it, or they might murder you. All of which is just fine with the critics, but it is not just fine with the rest of us. Karmelo Anthony bought into this morally bankrupt foolishness, and now two lives are over, and two families are ruined—though Karmelo Anthony’s family seems to be doing OK with its GoFundMe.
There is a culture clash in America going on between models of public behavior. The primarily European model of public consideration for others is one in which you do not try to dominate public spaces and where you are aware of and considerate of other people who are present. And then there is the Third World model, which we are all experiencing more and more, and we are getting pretty damn tired of it. That is one where interactions in public spaces are a test of power. Can you be obnoxious and get away with it?
We are seeing this a lot lately in various forms. How about the idiots who think it is a great idea to turn on their phones' speakers and have loud conversations in public? We have reached the point on airplanes where we must remind people that they need to use headphones if they are going to be listening to music or videos. Were these people raised by wolves? Some of them are obviously stupid. Some are retaining the habits of their garbage homelands. But for others, it is a way of showing they are the boss and daring others to stop them. That is what the black father in Brooklyn did when some idiot was shouting into his phone. He told the guy to stop, and the guy murdered him.
The unspoken but evident potential for violence in these situations is a feature, not a bug. Like Karmelo Anthony, many of these people are looking for trouble. They want it. And normal people have a decision to make. They can let it go, but then the troublemaker wins—at least that passes for an achievement in these unaccomplished losers’ lives—but it grates on normal folks. Or you can intervene and then maybe get murdered, or if you fight back and win, suddenly you are the criminal. Remember that lunatic on the subway who was threatening people, and then the Marine grabbed him, put him in a chokehold, and he gacked? The Marine got put on trial for murder. So, are you going to put your livelihood, liberty, and life on the line because some idiot is shouting on public transportation? Sadly, society does not have your back if you do. That is because people in positions of power in our society want you, as a normal, civilized person, to suffer at the hands of degenerates. The race hustlers and stupid liberal wine women who excuse away the pathologies of barbarians while crying about the discipline of the civilized hate you and want you to be abused.
These two models of behavior are incompatible. You can either have a civilized society, or you can have a Third World society and everything that comes along with it. For a long time, we have been tolerating Third World behavior. But that seems to be ending. People are calling out this problem, including the racial aspects, which was unprecedented until the left normalized it. Now, the civilized are striking back, and they really do not care if you call them racist because they do not want to put up with idiots acting the fool in public.
In the case of Karmelo Anthony, he decided he was going to be a jerk and go into someone else’s area and dare people to stand up to his crap. Well, Austin Metcalf stood up to him, so he took that as a threat to his manhood and murdered Austin Metcalf without a second thought. That kind of Third World idiocy is endemic to much of the world. And, not coincidentally, where it is endemic, there is poverty, chaos, corruption, and general misery. A society where you cannot discipline yourself to not be a jerk and where you must constantly test all of those around you to prove your own manhood is one that does not go to the moon. Instead, it goes down to the polluted river with a plastic bucket that was imported, because your trash country does not make anything, to get cholera-laden water to carry back to your hut.
So, it works out poorly on a societal level, but it also works out poorly for individuals. For instance, Karmelo Anthony is about to have his manhood tested the hard way for the next 35 years in the prison shower.
We keep hearing about how a multicultural society is wonderful, but it is not wonderful in the sense that you cannot have competing cultures. You cannot have one culture of civilized behavior and another culture of savagery coexisting. There are two choices: surrender or fight back. But the surrender paradigm is no longer working. We are no longer going to tolerate Karmelo Anthonys murdering people because of some perverted street honor code. There was a much-seen clip of some protester outside the court asking what she was supposed to tell her five sons in the wake of Karmelo Anthony’s conviction, and the unanimous response—including from many black commentators—was that she should tell her sons not to go around murdering people.
We are done accepting excuses. We are done accepting bad behavior. There is no racial debt that must be paid back in the blood of innocents. Those of us of a certain age have seen the coming backlash before, after liberals have normalized and tolerated crime for a while. Inevitably, the tough-on-crime politicians get elected and impose tough-on-crime policies. But what is different this time is that the people are calling this out for what it is. As his supporters have made clear, Karmelo Anthony thought he had a special kind of street code that gave him a free pass to butcher anybody who pointed out his obnoxious public behavior. Well, we reject that, and you can call us all the names you want. It does not work anymore. Some amorphous sense of collective guilt is not going to convince us to agree to being murdered. The consensus is developing that we need to stop putting up with this behavior and start putting people in jail for a long, long time. Now, of course, that is the moderate solution. The real solution is to start promptly executing criminals even as we purge our institutions of this bizarre desire to justify Third World social chaos. Don't underestimate the potential viciousness of the backlash that is on the way. The thuggish likes of Karmelo Anthony are going to force open an Overton window and are then going to be thrown out of it.
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