What we allow
Hello from the tail end of a busy summer.
I was in London and Liverpool with my teenage daughter in June and then in Bangkok, Hanoi and Singapore with my husband in July.
The UK trip was before things blew up there but it was clear as a bell that trouble was coming and soon. Their election was still a few weeks away but the mood, online but also in real life, was tense and angry. Tommy Robinson’s face and words were everywhere. Calling people who don’t want unchecked, illegal, immigration, “racist,” was getting old. It certainly felt like the match had already been lit and was just looking around to spread the fire.
I’m not a British politics expert but I have a warm spot for the UK so I follow it closer than I do the inner workings of other foreign countries. I lived in Scotland two separate times during college, spent a lot of time in England and Wales, and always felt at home in Britain. The small towns and cities, the pub life, the tightknit families that could trace their lineage for generations, it was all very endearing. They knew where they belonged, they didn’t have hyphens or asides in their self-descriptions, and I, an immigrant American Jew whose disjointed family history is mostly full of movement and displacement, always found that very appealing.
But the leftist rot was coming on strong. The homogeneity in the UK, the sameness of the people, became unacceptable. How dare their country not have more diversity?
So now they do and it’s not under any kind of guidelines or laws. People come in however and whenever they feel like it. The question has long been if and when British people will decide they’ve had enough. They will be subject to name-calling and ridiculous prosecution. It will not be easy but the longer they wait the more difficult it will become. The longer something is allowed, the harder it is to stop.
A lot of this is painted as anti-Muslim sentiment but that’s not right. Yes, it is Muslims illegally entering Britain and forcing unwanted change on their culture. But in the United States our open southern border is allowing similar changes to our society and it’s not Muslims coming across. I was in New York in July and saw migrant families begging in the streets. I tweeted about it here and here. A lot of people wrote to tell me it’s not just New York, they’ve seen children begging in the streets in various cities and states across America.
The trip to Asia brought Britain’s problems, and ours, into sharp focus for me. I had heard, of course, that Singapore was a wonderland of cleanliness and order. And that’s because they have such strict laws, right? When you think about it, with some exceptions like no porn or recreational drugs, we largely have the same laws they do. No littering, no loitering, no soliciting, the more serious ones about assault, robbery, murder, we have all of them. Maybe they have harsher punishments, sure, but we have weak punishments because we largely don’t enforce our laws, in particular in our major cities. We don’t need to cane someone for graffiti. But if there’s no punishment at all we will end up with graffiti all over our cities, which is what we have now. We allow disorder to go on. It’s not that we need tougher laws or new laws, we just need to enforce the laws we have. This extends from littering to immigration and so on. There’s more to say on this, and this post is getting long, but so many problems that we face can be helped by first fixing the disorder in our society.
Then there’s the additional angle that the rules do not apply to everyone equally. That’s an easy place to get to when you have rules or laws but don’t enforce them. You can choose to enforce them only for some people. There’s a quote I like, attributed to a former president of Peru, “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.” The Free Press reports today that that’s exactly what’s happening on campuses. And in Britain, the Prime Minister is labeled “two-tier Kier” for treating anti-immigrant protesters differently than Islamic ones.
Politics is downstream from culture, Andrew Breitbart used to say, but it’s hard to have a cohesive culture in a lawless country. Laws can’t advance culture but they do shape it. A permissive legal system, which punishes people for various offenses seemingly at random, will lead to a troubled culture. That’s where Britain is. That’s where we are.
I talk about some of this in the last three (short) monologues of my podcast, The Karol Markowicz Show. 1, 2, and 3.
Here are the interviews I’ve done on the show since the last time I wrote:
In June I wrote, in the New York Post, about how New York’s Jews were facing daily harassment, and worse, and wondered when someone would do something about it. It’s August and that question still stands.
I was on America’s Newsroom to talk about it:
Also in the New York Post, I wrote about how the way kids use social media has changed and our conversations around it need to change too.
In the days before Joe Biden announced he wasn’t running for re-election, I wrote about how it didn’t matter which Democrat was running, they’re all in the pocket of special interest groups, particularly teachers’ unions.
Over at Fox News, I wrote my yearly Americaversary post and how I haven’t been very optimistic the last few years particularly because we can’t admit to our problems.
Back on America’s Newsroom, I talked the media gaslighting us about Kamala Harris:
In the NY post, I wrote about how Trump has to adjust his tone, but not necessarily his message, to women.
A few days ago in the Post I covered detransitioners suing Planned Parenthood.
I talked about it on Varney&Co two days ago.
Finally, my co-author Bethany Mandel and I were on The Megyn Kelly Show yesterday. We have a joke that Megyn loves cursing when we’re on:
Thank you for reading, watching, listening! I appreciate you all!
Karol
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