Motus Mentis

In response to an extraordinary rise in subterranean crime over the past few years, New York Governess Kathy Hochul has announced that she will be deploying National Guard troops and State Police in the NYC subways in an attempt to make the system safer, or at least to seem safer. They will apparently be conducting mandatory, random bag-checks.

So: the military will now be in the subways, with the power to detain and arrest, rummaging through women’s purses and through whatever else riders might be carrying. The Governess, when asked whether citizens had the right to refuse to be searched (perhaps you have some personal item in your bag that you don’t want soldiers to be pawing at), said “Yes, and we can refuse them. They can walk.”

Will this make people safer? Let’s say that you are an armed criminal, seeking to commit violent crime on the subway. Will you now carry your knife, or your gun, in your backpack, or will you secrete it elsewhere on your person? With this in mind, will there also now be pat-downs?

What about profiling? In order to avoid charges of Discrimination, the vilest sin imaginable, will these “random” checks mean that seventy-year-old grandmothers will be spread-eagled against the wall while disheveled, gibbering young men with the flame of predatory madness in their eyes walk by? I guess we’ll have to see.

Meanwhile, on Long Island, the discovery of scattered body parts, beginning with a woman’s head and a man’s arm, led to the arrest of four people:

The gruesome foursome allegedly tried to conceal the corpses in a scheme so grisly that the drains, toilets, sinks and showers stopped working in the Amityville home where three of the accused had just moved weeks earlier, prosecutors claimed in Suffolk County court.

They have been released without bail.

Political thinkers from Hobbes to Schmitt have understood that the fundamental principle that legitimizes the power of the State is the reciprocal obligation of obedience and protection. We cede to the State the awesome power of coercion by threat of violence, and in return we expect a guarantee of our public and personal security. This means that when the State abandons its side of that obligation, it is the right, and the duty, of the citizenry to secure their own protection.

In related news, a judge has refused to dismiss manslaughter charges against Daniel Penny, who valiantly subdued a menacing lunatic on the subway last year. (Penny is, of course, white, and the violent madman he restrained, with fatal consequences, was black.)

Here’s another story you might have missed (my italics):

Thanks to an ongoing Center for Immigration Studies Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, the public now knows that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has approved secretive flights that last year alone ferried hundreds of thousands of inadmissible aliens from foreign airports into some 43 American ones over the past year, all pre-approved on a cell phone app. (See links to prior CIS reports at the end of this post.)

But while large immigrant-receiving cities and media lay blame for the influx on Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s busing program, CBP has withheld from the Center – and apparently will not disclose – the names of the 43 U.S. airports that have received 320,000 inadmissible aliens from January through December 2023, nor the foreign airports from which they departed. The agency’s lawyers have cited a general “law enforcement exception” without elaborating – until recently – on how releasing airport locations would harm public safety beyond citing “the sensitivity of the information.”

Despite the shameless gaslighting about crime we are about to hear in this evening’s State of the Union address, it should be clear to all Americans that the ancient contract between ruler and ruled has not only been broken, but willfully so, and “with malice aforethought”. Does this make you angry?

If it doesn’t, God help us.