The collapse of the California middle class in big cities

 Victor Davis Hanson:

In a recent online exchange, the YouTuber Casey Neistat posted his fury after his car was broken into and the contents stolen. Los Angeles, he railed, was turning into a “3rd-world s-hole of a city.”

The multimillionaire actor Seth Rogen chastised Neistat for his anger.

Rogen claimed that a car’s contents were minor things to lose. He added that while living in West Hollywood he had his own car broken into 15 times, but thought little of it.

Online bloggers ridiculed Rogen. No wonder — the actor lives in multimillion-dollar homes in the Los Angeles area, guarded by sophisticated security systems and fencing.

Yet both Neistat and Rogen accurately defined Third Worldization: the utter breakdown of the law and the ability of the rich within such a feudal society to find ways to avoid the violent chaos.

After traveling the last 45 years in the Middle East, southern Europe, Mexico, and Asia Minor, I observed some common characteristics of a so-called Third-World society. And all of them might feel increasingly familiar to contemporary Americans.

Whether in Cairo or Naples, theft was commonplace. Yet property crimes were almost never seriously prosecuted.

In a medieval-type society of two rather than three classes, the rich in walled estates rarely worry that much about thievery. Crime is written off as an intramural problem of the poor, especially when the middle class is in decline or nonexistent.

Violent crime is now soaring in America. But two things are different about America’s new criminality.

One is the virtual impunity of it. Thieves now brazenly swarm a store, ransack, steal, and flee with the merchandise without worry of arrest.

Second, the Left often justifies crime as a sort of righteous payback against a supposedly exploitative system. So, the architect of the so-called 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, preened of the riotous destruction of property during the summer of 2020: “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.”

Third Worldization reflects the asymmetry of law enforcement. Ideology and money, not the law, adjudicate who gets arrested and tried, and who does not.

There were 120 days of continuous looting, arson, and lethal violence during the summer of 2020. Rioters burned courthouses, police precincts, and an iconic church.

And there was also a frightening riot on January 6, when a mob entered Washington D.C.’s Capitol and damaged federal property. Of those arrested during the violence, many have been held in solitary confinement or under harsh jail conditions. That one-day riot is currently the subject of a congressional investigation.

Some of those arrested are still — 10 months later — awaiting trial. The convicted are facing long prison sentences.

In contrast, some 14,000 were arrested in the longer and more violent rioting of 2020. Most were released without bail. The majority had their charges dropped. Very few are still being held awaiting capital charges.

A common denominator to recent controversies at the Justice Department, CIA, FBI, and Pentagon is that all these agencies under dubious pretexts have investigated American citizens with little or no justification — after demonizing their targets as “treasonous,” “domestic terrorists,” “white supremacists,” or “racists.”

In the Third World, basic services like power, fuel, transportation, and water are characteristically unreliable: in other words, much like a frequent California brownout.
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There is a general collapse of civilization in major cities in California and elsewhere where Soros-backed DAs have refused to prosecute petty criminals.  New York was like that before Rudy Guiliani became mayor and started prosecuting petty crimes like broken windows.  It led to a golden age in New York where crimes were reduced significantly. In California, there appears to be an escalation in crimes that are not prosecuted.  In many Democrat-controlled cities, they are defunding the police which also leads to more crime.

There is a reason many people in the California middle class have decamped for Texas and Tennessee.

Minnesota has also suffered from the Democrat riot crime spree.

WHO’S IN FAVOR OF LOOTING?