There were 959 carjackings in Washington, D.C., last year—up from 148 in 2018. Shoplifting is so bad that stores in some neighborhoods have closed. The CVS on Pennsylvania Avenue, a few blocks from the White House, keeps Charmin toilet paper and trash bags in locked cabinets.
Not surprisingly, though, to the dismay of progressive activists, it’s not just conservatives who want crime prevented, prosecuted, and punished. After a disastrous experiment under far-left District Attorney Chesa Boudin, even ultraliberal San Francisco had had enough of rampant lawlessness and fired him back in 2022.
On Tuesday, almost-as-woke Los Angeles replaced its deliberately feckless, far-left District Attorney George Gascon with a “former federal prosecutor who ran on a platform of ‘restoring safety and justice,’” according to local station KTLA.
In elections across America, the Democrats tried to reduce everything to identity politics. Anyone voting against their candidates, they claimed, did so because of racism or misogyny, not because they preferred conservative policies.
But the truth is, people of all races and both sexes don’t like being victims of crime. It’s a universal value.
Just as they prefer ineffective alternatives to punishing crime, the American Left does not want immigration enforcement either. If she had been elected, Kamala Harris had promised to support a Senate border bill that she claimed would have fixed the border she and Joe Biden broke.
Not only would the bill have failed to do that—as I explained here in a previous column—but it would have made taxpayers foot the bill for lawyers so millions of economic migrants Biden let in could make unmerited or fraudulent asylum claims and drag them out in immigration court as long as possible.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which used to defend free........