The left’s response to the unprovoked stabbing and murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte Metro train is a case study in how the activist left reframes issues to increase state control and diminish individual responsibility.
Their success in recasting the discussion of crime, homelessness and mental illness has created the unsafe and rapidly deteriorating conditions throughout America’s cities.
Today’s left-wing activists and politicians seek to control the outcome of public policy debates through two primary methods: defining what is considered the acceptable vocabulary for the discussion, and constraining the argument.
Their defining the vocabulary gives us words like “unhoused” instead of homeless, “system-impacted person” in the place of criminal, “substance use disorder patient” instead of drug addict, and so on.
These terms are not used as part of an effort to be more precise, but rather to shift responsibility. “Unhoused” shifts focus toward a lack of housing, rather than the decisions which can lead to homelessness. “Justice-impacted person” recasts the criminal as victim and minimizes personal culpability.
In the case of Decarlos Brown Jr., who stands accused of the murder of Ms. Zarutska, Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles perfectly illustrates these techniques in her widely ridiculed statement. Notice the use of the left’s new vocabulary:
This is a tragic situation that sheds light on problems with society safety nets related to mental healthcare and the systems that should be in place.
As we come to understand what happened and why, we must look at the entire situation.
While I do not know the specifics of the man’s medical record, what I have come to understand is that he has long struggled with mental health and appears to have suffered a crisis.
This was the unfortunate and tragic outcome. While there are questions about the safety and security of our transit system and our city, I do know there have been significant and sustained efforts to address safety and security within our transit system and across our city…
However, tragic incidents like these should force us to look at what we are doing across our community to address root causes. We will never arrest our way out issues such homelessness and mental health. I am committed to doing the hard work with Mecklenburg County, community leaders, health care service providers, and the private sector to ensure that Charlotte continues to be one of the best cities in the world, with the highest quality of life for everyone.
I want to be clear that I am not villainizing those who struggle with their mental health or those who are unhoused. Mental health disease is just that – a disease like any other than needs to be treated with the same compassion, diligence and commitment as cancer or heart disease. Our community must work to address the underlying issue of access to mental healthcare. Also, those who are unhoused are more frequently the victim of crimes and not the perpetrators. Too many people who are on the street need a safe place to sleep and wrap around services to lift them up. We, as a community, must do better for those members of our community who need help and have no place to go.
Beyond defining the vocabulary with all of the left’s poll-tested weasel words, Lyles employs the additional technique of constraining the argument through what is called victim narrative and structural injustice framing, along with pathologizing personal behavior.
No mention is made of Brown’s 14 prior arrests, or the decisions made by officials to release him back onto the streets.
Instead, Lyles pivots the discussion away from personal responsibility to unaccountable “systems.” Instead of the crime being the result of Brown’s decisions, blame is shifted to “the community,” and “access to mental healthcare.” Brown’s personal choices and criminal conduct are recast as medical conditions.
While Mayor Lyles has been rightly called out for her sanitizing statement, every day there are dozens if not hundreds of other cases of left wing politicians, academics, and staffers engaged in precisely the same practices. Recasting criminals as victims, brushing aside personal accountability, and excusing away behavior as the mere consequences of “disease.”
Those of us interested in putting a stop to the crime, drug abuse, runaway homelessness and mental illness which are creating victims every day cannot allow the left’s reframing to continue unchallenged.
When politicians try to disguise their failed policies using abstract terms and shifting accountability, we must call them out for it.
The burden is now on us to highlight how truth brings solutions, while the left’s word laundering hides solutions behind a fog of words.
While the left talks about “systems,” we must share the stories of those who have become the latest victims of the other team’s failed policies.
And we must force a discussion of the choice – what will it cost to continued down the path today’s urban politicians have chosen, and how much better can it become by restoring accountability, responsibility and the deterrence of an effective criminal justice system.
Ron Nehring is the Director of the International School of Politics at the Leadership Institute and a former Chairman of the California Republican Party.