I was reminded today of what the character of Floyd Ferris said to Hank Reardon in Atlas Shrugged:
There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kinds of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted — and you create a nation of lawbreakers — and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Rearden, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.
The criminalization of every day life proceeds apace as the Left In America seeks to enslave us.
In two separate posts over at Protein Wisdom, Jeff Goldstein covered two stories that illustrate for me the Left’s ongoing project to turn all of us into criminals of some type, so that they can intimidate us, Mafia-style, into becoming their sheeple.
The first concerns an Eagle Scout high schooler named Cole Withrow. From the Fox News report Jeff quotes from:
Eagle Scout Cole Withrow was just a few weeks from graduating with honors from his North Carolina high school, but now the active church member is facing a felony weapons charge and a precarious future after accidentally leaving a shotgun in his pickup truck in the school parking lot.
…Withrow had been skeet shooting with friends a day before, and only noticed he had left his shotgun in his truck on Monday morning as he reached to grab his book bag, said family friend Kimberly Boykin. When he realized his mistake, rather than leave school grounds, he went to the front office to call his mother for help.
“He didn’t know what to do,” Boykin, whose son is friends with Withrow, told Fox News. “If you jump in the truck and leave, then they get you for skipping school. Once you are there you have to say.
…
“You teach your kids if you’re in trouble or if you see you’ve done something wrong, go ahead and admit it,” she said. “Be a man and it’ll be fixed. In this case, that’s what he did and he’s being punished for it. That’s not the lesson we need to teach our kids.”
Withrow, who did his senior class project on gun safety, locked the gun in his truck before going to call his mother. But when he asked her to come and take the gun, the trouble started.
“He was overheard in a private conversation with his mother explaining what happened,” Boykin said. “He could have told a story, but he told the truth.”
A spokesperson for Johnston County Schools confirmed to Fox News that they found the shotgun in Withrow’s locked vehicle.
“The law is very clear when a person knowingly and willingly brings a weapon onto educational property,” spokesperson Tracey Peedin Jones said. “The situation was turned over to law enforcement immediately.”
Boykin said he was also expelled for 365 days – meaning that he will not be able to graduate from high school.
Zero Tolerance rears it’s mutated, pablum-puking head again.
And again…
In another posting, Jeff quotes from this report by Jesse Walker of Reason:
Meet Kiera Wilmot, a 16-year-old student in Bartow, Florida. Before last week, Bartow High School Principal Ron Pritchard tells WTSP-TV, she had “never been in trouble before. Ever.” But then, the station reports, she
mix[ed] household chemicals in a tiny 8-ounce water bottle, causing the top to pop off, followed by billowing smoke in [a] small explosion.
Wilmot’s friends and classmates said it was “a science project gone bad, that she never meant to hurt anyone.”
Even the teen’s principal said, “She made a bad choice. Honestly, I don’t think she meant to ever hurt anyone. She wanted to see what would happen [when the chemicals mixed] and was shocked by what it did. Her mother is shocked too.”The explosion happened around 7 a.m. Monday morning on school property, and no one was hurt. Staff, along with the school resource officer, acted quickly.
The principal told 10 News, “She told us everything and was very honest. She didn’t run or try to hide the truth. We had a long conversation with her.”
So: No one was hurt. There’s no sign that Wilmot was up to something malevolent. The kid’s own principal thinks this wasn’t anything more than an experiment, and he says she didn’t try to cover up what she had done. What punishment do you think she received? A stern talking-to? A day or two of after-school detention? Maybe she’ll have to help clean up the lab for a week?
Nope. The budding chemist has been kicked out of school and charged with a couple of felonies:
Wilmot was arrested Monday morning and charged with possession/discharge of a weapon on school property and discharging a destructive device.
The teen was expelled and will now complete her education in an expulsion program.
Miami New Times reports that Wilmot will be tried as an adult.
A statement from Polk County Schools says, “We urge our parents to join us in conveying the message that there are consequences to actions. We will not compromise the safety and security of our students and staff.”…
As Jeff remarks:
Not to beat yet again on how language and intentionalism plays into all this, but look at what’s at work here: the student and the principal — hell, all parties involved — agree that there was no malicious intent. No one was injured. The student was forthcoming and cooperated with school administrators. And she had been a model student. Forever.
And yet the school and the school board are all pretending that they are hopelessly constrained by rules, as if those rules can exist without a human agency behind them, or a human agency available to interpret and implement them — as if the rules merely appeared one day in the sand, produced by the accidental scratchings of egret feet, and a cult was built up around them demanding that they be followed to the letter, with no room to consider the intent behind them. Rendering all powerless forever more to defy the dictates of their found totem!
Were these rules produced and implemented to punish students who, with no malice, accidentally caused a disturbance — students who had never been in trouble and who were engaging in scientific experimentation — in a way that forces their expulsion? Was this the intent behind them?
If so, the rules are surreal and need to be scrapped and their authors punished — or, if they have passed on, dug up and bitch slapped. If not, then the school administrators’ decision to hide behind them to justify they’re overreaction and petty tyrannical impulses is merely disgusting and, of course, linguistically incoherent.
Besides their desire to intimidate us, the Left is also seeking to rid our minds of all traces of Common Sense. Zero Tolerance policies help them do this because their foot soldiers, Fellow Travellers, and Dupes can hide behind such policies and claim — and they do in both cases presented here — that they’re doing it for ‘the safe and security’ of the community, especially ‘for the children’, when, in Truth, they are servants of a destructive and pernicious disease, a cancer.
The cancer known as Leftist Thinking continues it’s insidious metastisizing through every nook and cranny of The American Body.
Like actual cancer, Leftist Thinking drains the body of it’s strength as it destroys bone and tissue and muscle. It slowly consumes the Will. It weakens the Soul. The goal is to so weaken the Soul that it will voluntarily give-up and submit to the cancer. And then the cancer turns on the Soul and crushes it.
What can we do about this?
I like Jeff’s advice:
Fight. Be an outlaw.
Resistentiam Tyrannis nunc.
Resistentiam Tyrannis saecula.
PROSCRIPTUS!
Resistance to Tyranny now.
Resistance to Tyranny forever.
OUTLAWS!
