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crime and punishment responsibility

Race to Fatherlessness

“Attention is a limited resource,” Josh Oldham tells fellow Good Kid Productions co-​founder Rob Montz, “and in a moment of crisis,” after the 2020 police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, “a lot of Americans” accepted a “race narrative” about the incident.

In a new documentary, The Broken Boys of Kenosha: Jacob Blake, Kyle Rittenhouse, and the Lies We Still Live, Oldham and Montz present “7 sacred tenets” of the race narrative advanced by the media that were verifiably false. 

Those bogus beliefs “inspired thousands of protesters to descend on Kenosha” so that the city was “incinerated by a lie,” leading to 17-​year-​old Kyle Rittenhouse’s infamous visit to protect people and property, wherein he shot three men, two fatally … in self-​defense

Yet, the filmmakers don’t stop there; they offer “a deeper story.”

“Burn away the media-​manufactured fiction about Jacob Blake and what do you see?” asks Montz. “You see a bad man,” he acknowledges, “but you ought to also see an abandoned boy.”

Montz calls Jacob Blake “just one tiny data point in a mass trend” of “an unspoken catastrophe … the explosion in the number of boys who grow up without dads.” One of every three Americans boys is growing up without a father in the home.

Blake was hardly alone — Rittenhouse and both assailants he killed were were also fatherless.

“The thing that actually correlates most closely to whether a kid is going to go into a life of crime,” former Attorney General Bill Barr points out, “is whether or not they had a father who was involved in their lives.”

The moral plague that follows — of “unanchored” men — is a problem government seems mostly to have exacerbated. Only we dads can solve it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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crime and punishment ideological culture

Democrats: Dissonance on Self-Defense

The Kyle Rittenhouse case, which I talked about on my podcast, This Week in Common Sense, reveals a deep divide.

One side thinks young Mr. Rittenhouse is guilty because he clearly sided with property-​owners by cleaning up graffiti, putting out fires, caring for the riots’ victims … and carrying a big, scary-​looking rifle; the other points to the facts of the altercation between Rittenhouse and the three men he shot, judging the shootings self-defense.

On Monday, the lead prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger, insisted that “You lose the right to self-​defense when you’re the one who brought the gun,” despite that not being Wisconsin law. Rittenhouse also wasn’t the only one with a gun.

While the prosecution tried to undermine self-​defense by declaring that Rittenhouse had instigated the whole scene, the media relentlessly feeds a general prejudice against the idea that citizens should be armed and for the notion that we must rely upon the police alone. 

Dissonant with this, however, were the months of leftists excusing, when not cheering, “protests” turned violent in which not only property was destroyed, but people were killed. To top off this cultural license to mayhem, progressive mavens pushed the opposite of state protection: let the mob run riot.

Followed by “defund the police.”

The leftist/​statist argument seems to be: You mustn’t protect yourself with deadly force, instead relying upon the state — except when we (the left) riot, then no protection for you!

This is a recipe for civil war or tyranny or both. 

Not civil peace.

Meanwhile, as Rittenhouse’s jury deliberates, everyone assumes that leftists itch to take an acquittal as another excuse to riot.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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crime and punishment

Hearts United

“They shot my son seven times — seven times — like he didn’t matter,” explained a choked-​up Jacob Blake, Sr., at a news conference after his son was shot and paralyzed by Kenosha police. “But my son matters. He’s a human being and he matters.”

On Sunday, Kenosha police were called to a domestic disturbance. Attending his three-year-old’s birthday party in the same neighborhood, Jacob Blake, Jr., was reportedly “trying to break up the argument” between two women. Police have provided scant details, but two cell-​phone videos made public show Blake wrestling with police on the passenger side of his vehicle and then walking around to the driver’s side followed by police with their guns drawn. As Blake starts to get into the driver’s seat, an officer grabs Blake’s shirt and then fires seven shots at close range into his back. 

The Washington Post labeled it “the latest incident this summer to … divide a nation over the urgency of bringing fundamental change to law enforcement.” 

But we are not so divided. Not on criminal justice reform, which whopping majorities across all races and political parties fervently support. 

“The only response worthy of the moment is laws,” argued Rev. Al Sharpton. I’m with him. Let’s legally toss chokeholds, no-​knock raids, qualified immunity, civil forfeiture, and police unions … along with their contracts hiding misconduct from the public.

Americans of all races are also united, not divided, in opposing the violence and destruction by rioters in Kenosha and Minneapolis and Portland and elsewhere. 

“As I was riding through the city, I noticed a lot of damage,” Blake’s mother, Julia Jackson, told the media. “It doesn’t reflect my son. Or my family. If Jacob knew what was going on … the violence and the destruction, he would be very unpleased.”

“Take a moment,” she urged, “and examine your heart.”

She continued, “Clearly, you can see by now that I have beautiful brown skin. But take a look at your hand and whatever shade it is, it is beautiful as well.”

In calling for healing, she declared, “I am not talking to just Caucasian people; I am talking to everyone.”

I hope everyone is listening.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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