Crime desk: Normalizing Smash-and-Grabs
For all the recent news on smash-and-grab lootings, retail crime has actually been rising “for the past five years, with organized criminal rings targeting stores everywhere from Woonsocket (Rhode Island) to Greensboro (North Carolina) to Grafton (Wisconsin),” reports City Journal’s Steven Malanga. Losses soared from $453,940 per $1 billion in sales in 2015 to $719,458 in 2020. It’s depressing profits and traumatizing staff, Best Buy’s CEO warns, and national chains have shuttered stores. Law-enforcement officials blame softer penalties: “Thirty-eight states now don’t consider shoplifting a felony unless $1,000 or more of merchandise gets stolen.” Bail reforms, too, have put perps quickly back on the streets, “where some go right back to stealing.” The question now is whether smash-and-grabs and terrorized employees will become “normality.”
Libertarian: Lockdown Made Kids Sicker
Two years of isolation and remote learning turned children “into dry immunological kindling” by stripping their immune systems, fumes Pamela J. Hobart at Reason, causing “an unprecedented, counterseasonal surge in communicable illnesses” like RSV, hand, foot and mouth disease, the flu and strep throat. Kids who didn’t get sick during the 2020-21 season were “slammed” by illness last year. “Immunologists and pediatricians should have foreseen that, unless we were going to lock children down forever, these surges in childhood illness were basically inevitable,” as children “with existing partial immunity to endemic contagious diseases” pre-lockdown “missed many opportunities to be exposed again, which would have refreshed their immune systems” during their two years stuck at home. “We ended up with the opposite of herd immunity: a bunch of kids with suboptimal immune systems.”
Conservative: Blinken’s Broken Record
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has “faced the complexities of the multipolar twenty-first-century world and issued a Spotify playlist,” snarks Spectator World’s Dominic Green. Blinken says “ ‘music ‘transcends borders.’ The same goes for the immigrants at the Rio Grande and Iran’s nuclear ambitions, two jams to which Blinken might more usefully apply himself.” There’s “no faster way to fall out with a friend, antagonize the stranger and confirm your enemies’ contempt than asserting your taste in music — apart, that is, from doing really bold solos like flitting from Afghanistan without telling your allies, promising everything to Iranian negotiators before the negotiations begin or threatening to fight Putin over Ukraine and then backing down.” Blinken’s “playlist is the soundtrack to failure. Too bad ‘The Sound of Silence’ isn’t here.”
1619 watch: Hannah-Jones Still Erring
National Review’s Dan McLaughlin catches 1619 Project chief Nikole Hannah-Jones in yet another laughable whopper, touching on the November 1775 slave-emancipation proclamation by Lord Dunmore, the royal governor for Virginia: Her book argues, “For men like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, the Dunmore Proclamation ignited the turn to independence.” Notes McLaughlin, “Four months before the Dunmore Proclamation, George Washington was not merely considering joining a war against Britain; he was already its commander in chief.” Tom Jefferson had attended the revolutionary Second Virginia Convention in March 1775, which voted to send troops to fight the king. And James Madison, just 23, was “already serving with his father on a revolutionary Committee of Safety.”
From the right: Workplace-Speech Confusion
The National Labor Relations Board suit arguing “that Whole Foods must allow workers to wear ‘Black Lives Matter’ masks at work” sets off Jonathan Turley at The Hill. The “NLRB complaint does not grapple with the obvious problem: Can employees wear ‘Blue Lives Matter’ or pro-life or pro-choice masks?” In fact, “Whole Foods has every right to dictate the appearance of its stores and staff.” But “the NLRB would radically alter the right of companies to make such decisions in the appearance and messaging in the workplace. That, of course, could change — the minute an NLRB lawyer shows up wearing a MAGA hat.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
