By John F. Di Leo –
It is well known that the modern Democratic party does not believe in the concept of capital punishment for crimes, even for the crimes long regarded as of a “capital” nature, such as murder, violent robbery, violent rape, and treason. They advocate jail time, preferably brief, in cozy, comfortable cells, of regulation size… and if there isn’t enough room, the Left mandates that the prisons be opened so the overflow can walk free, rather than be incarcerated for their crimes in harsh, uncomfortable surroundings.
But this isn’t to say that the modern Left opposes the death penalty completely. In fact, there are many whom the modern Left condemns to death, every day, though not in so many words.
Consider, for example, the children in the inner cities, shot in their yards or on their porches by the drive-by killers of the street gangs who rule their neighborhoods. Since it is the American Left who has redrawn the criminal justice system to invite in foreign villains, or to enable homegrown ones, by ensuring that even caught-and-convicted criminals run free, is it not the American Left who condemned these innocent children – sometimes hundreds per year – to a violent death, the tragic targets of the gang violence of Chicago, New York, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Los Angeles?
And what of their brothers and sisters, who survive their yards, their porches, and their neighborhood parks, but are endangered every day in the halls and classrooms of the public grammar schools, junior highs, and high schools of those same cities? No, not the magnet schools, or the charter schools, that win awards and save the lucky few who win the lotteries or have the right connections… but the regular schools, the taxpayer funded gang recruiting stations with names like “PS-101”… where they are beaten, or threatened, perhaps forced into a gang, or pushed into drug consumption or prostitution, or punished for refusing. Even those who physically survive all this are still likely to receive a substandard education, condemning them to lives in poverty, in public housing, in these dens of welfare checks and despair, and the early death of life in a crime zone.
We turn our gaze away from the welfare state, and look at the world of working Americans, the working poor, the lower middle class through the upper middle class. This is the world of regular folks, the vast majority of Americans. These are people who – until seven years ago – usually received their health insurance through their employers. It wasn’t always great; sometimes the copay or deductible was higher, or the number of convenient providers was lower, than they would have liked. And when they lost a job, they’d be without healthcare for a few weeks or even months, until they got their next job, and that new employer-provided healthcare kicked in. Less than optimal.
So the Democrat politicians gave us obamacare, on March 20, 2010, driving tens of millions of people out of work, or out of full time work, so that they had to get substandard health insurance from the government, insurance far worse, and much more expensive, than they’d had before. Seven years into this experiment in human misery, millions are suffering bankruptcy from the cost of obamacare or the loss of the full time jobs that obamacare killed; millions are suffering from substandard care or outright lack of treatment, treatment they would have had from the imperfect private system of a few years ago, but simply cannot be provided now that the government is running the show. If we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that this is a death penalty too, of a sort. The Democratic Party’s approach to healthcare, which sounded so generous, so caring, to some, when originally pitched, has in fact resulted in both a lack of care and an abundance of impoverishment. President Obama’s promise that, instead of “wasting resources” on costly surgery for the old or sick, “we’d just give you a pill,” turns out to have been an endorsement of the painkiller epidemic we fight today. What happens when the sick cannot get care, because government has rationed it to only the favored, the connected, and those lucky enough to be safely outside the bureaucrat’s clutches? This too is a death penalty, is it not?
Consider the political causes for which the Left (certainly not every Democrat voter, but long every Democrat politician) has long been most enthusiastic… their efforts to facilitate so-called mercy killings, with the clinical-sounding name “euthanasia.” In countries where it has taken off, like northern Europe, it results in the middle-aged doing away with elderly parents in astonishing numbers… and perhaps wondering how long they have until their own children decide that the middle-aged, too, are too old to live happily amidst us moderns…
And need we speak of the abortion issue, and the Left’s obsession with normalizing homosexual love affairs, contraception, an end to traditional marriage entirely? If anything related to procreation is discouraged, it is society itself that has been sentenced to a death penalty by the progressive policies of the modern Left. They champion every life choice except the one that leads to more human life. Look at post-modern Europe, with its plummeting birthrate and whole empty towns across a ghost continent… they have left plenty of room for migrants from Africa and the Middle East to fill, but with those new residents, the cradle of western civilization is no longer recognizable as Europe in any way but cartographical.
And that is their plan for America as well… not the intentional plan of every Democrat voter, of course, but the plan of the Left, now uncontested in leading the Democratic Party. Democrat voters may not realize – hopefully do not realize – what their candidates stand for, but it is plain to the naked eye. The eight long years of the Obama administration laid it bare:
The modern Left looks forward to the day when it comes here… when that same change arrives in America that their soulless policies have brought to Italy, to France, to Germany, to Holland, filling empty nurseries and schools with Sharia-observant Shia and Sunni migrants, who are only too happy to dine at the cornucopia that thousands of years of Western Civilization created, in a feverish contest to see just how fast they can deplete it, and leave an empty husk in its place, like a skeleton in a tropical lake after the piranhas have fed.
We see it in America every day, if we read the papers, and watch the evening news. The Somali enclaves of Minneapolis, the Sharia towns of Michigan, the Wahabi mosques of Chicago. Their numbers swell with regular immigration, with refugee importations, and with special “diversity green card lottery” systems that turbocharge the process in case it isn’t happening fast enough already.
Consider the latest example to hit our televisions and computer screens, on Tuesday, October 31, 2017, the Christian holiday of All Souls’ Day, which was also one of the biggest and most jovial of secular holidays as well, Halloween.
As a school bus full of children was returning from school, at 3pm in Manhattan, not far from the World Trade Center bombing sites of 1993 and 2001, so dear to the warped minds of the jihadists, an islamofascist terrorist came hurtling from out of nowhere, and crashed into their school bus.
This terrorist, one Sayfullo Saipov, arrived from Uzbekistan in 2010 on a "diversity visa program" green card seven years ago, rented a vehicle at a Home Depot on Halloween, and set out for a quiet park full of potential targets.
He turned onto a bike path, and careened down this path – one not meant for motorized vehicles – running down whatever innocents he could find, whether bicyclists or walkers or joggers… his only condition was that they be innocent and undeserving of the horrific death he had in mind for them. As he tumbled out of the vehicle and into the line of fire of an honorable policeman, this villain shouted “Allahu Akbar” – which correctly translates not to “God is great” as the politically correct say it, but rather, to “My god is greater than your God,” a spiteful and triumphant insult to the West, shouted by every jihadist who believes he has accomplished some great thing by murdering defenseless pedestrians, cyclists and school children.
America was in a recession when this demon arrived on our shores, invited here by the politically correct crowd who dreamed up this “diversity visa” program, invited even though we needed no more workers, no more criminals, no more welfare recipients… invited only because the Left wants more of his kind here. The Left wants more non-Christians, more non-Europeans, more “others” to continue to dilute the Judeo-Christian Western tradition that inspired our Founding Fathers to work so hard and sacrifice so much to give their descendants a land of limited government and limitless opportunity.
It is in fact the Left’s conscious goal to diminish our heritage, to stamp out the great beacon of liberty that our Founders left for us; they are happy to squander it all.
What was the crime of these students, these joggers, these innocent victims, that they should deserve such a sudden and violent attack by a foreign villain?
They were innocent. Those who died in Manhattan this Hallowen, and those who were injured, were just committing the sin of being free Americans, living their lives in New York City, hurting nobody.
And the jihadists cannot abide such freedom, such happiness, such joy. A myriad of mullahs and imams have taught their acolytes that such people must die, that in fact seeking out and killing such innocent victims is their surest path to paradise.
So, yes, this Uzbek immigrant is guilty; he committed this vicious, barbaric crime of his own volition; but he is not alone in his guilt. His teachers, the imams and mullahs who spread the homicidal philosophy of jihad across the globe, share in his guilt. He is a soldier in the field who received his orders from his commanders; ISIS announced just the day before that their followers should take advantage of our Halloween celebrations to commit their monstrous crimes. He’s no lone wolf; he was just following orders from others who share in his guilt.
And too, we must not forget the suicidal crew who invited him here in the first place. Who are the people who watch Islamofascist attacks every day, all over the world, and still open the doors to welcome ever more to our shores? Who are the progressives, in congress, in the judiciary, at the State department, and in the media and academia too, who have insisted on rolling out a red carpet to the most dangerous people from the most un-American parts of the world, through the generous provision of “diversity visas”? Only the Left. Only the nihilistic, self-destructive crowd of the modern Left could sink so low.
As it turns out, the modern Left does indeed believe in the death penalty. They dole out death sentences day and night, through abortion and euthanasia, through denial of health care and the flooding of neighborhoods with known killers and drug dealers, through conscious destruction of a once great nation by inviting planeload after planeload of refugees, Trojan horses every one, conveying terrorists among the refugees to our beautiful, vulnerable country.
What was the crime committed by these students, these cyclists and joggers? They committed no crime, none at all, but the Left meted out a death penalty to them nonetheless, by consciously importing the many representatives of a death cult into our country, a death cult that has committed itself to our utter destruction and subjugation. The Left knows, but still they open the floodgates, still they wave ever more enemies in.
There is much we can do, much that we need to focus on in America, to put our nation back on the straight and narrow path. We need tax cuts, spending cuts, criminal justice reform, obamacare repeal… there is so much to do…
But no other issue is as important as ending this horrific onslaught on the people of our great country. For America to survive, its people must survive, and that means ending the flood of death sentences that the worldview of the modern Left has unleashed upon our nation.
America was founded in support of the inalienable rights identified in the Enlightenment – life, and liberty, and the ownership of property and the free pursuit of happiness.
The culture of death, long championed by the islamofascists, and more subtly sponsored by the American Left, must be made to relinquish its death-grip on our culture and our institutions, or the death we will soon be mourning won’t be individuals, but our entire nation.
Copyright 2017 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland based writer, international trade trainer, and actor. His columns are regularly found in Illinois Review.
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