Jamaal Bowman ought to be a household name, but he isn’t. Outside of New York, very few people know who he is.
It’s not that Bowman, a ridiculously awful Democrat congressman from Yonkers, is noteworthy for anything good he’s done. There isn’t anything good he’s done. He’s utterly without significant legislative accomplishments.
In fact, what Bowman is known for is that he’s the member of Congress who pulled a fire alarm to save the Democrats from losing a vote on a continuing resolution that would fund the government with a few budget cuts he didn’t like. Then he told a ridiculous and completely implausible lie about the fire alarm, that somehow he was trying to open a door and pulling the lever on the alarm would do that.
Nobody believed Bowman, who is also by the way the only male member of The Squad, the hardcore left-wing Democrat Socialists of America coven in Congress whose better-known members include Ilhan Omar, AOC, and Rashida Tlaib. In fact, he was charged with a misdemeanor, namely of willfully or knowingly falsely pulling a fire alarm, and he agreed to pay a $1,000 fine and apologize to the Capitol Police.
When what he was really doing was interfering with the procedure of Congress, which is the crime for which a great many of the Jan. 6 protesters are sitting in what can best be described as a gulag of federal prisons more than three years after the fact.
A dozen members of Congress, noting that what Bowman was attempting to do as a member of Congress was to interrupt the good order of the House’s proceedings — when our political process contains mechanisms for interruptions that Bowman was not interested in taking because those mechanisms involve personal accountability and actual argumentation — attempted to expel him from the House for his actions.
But the bulk of the Republican caucus balked at that, and Bowman got off virtually scot-free.
He didn’t suffer any serious consequences for his actions. Instead, the House of Representatives did.
Because what happened next was that Tlaib essentially sponsored a pro-Hamas rally in the Capitol rotunda after the atrocities of Oct. 7 and while Hamas was holding on to more than a few Americans as hostages. Remember this?
So the consequence of not maintaining the good order of the House of Representatives with Bowman was that Tlaib led a bunch of marauding nuts into the Capitol to shout genocidal “From the river to the sea!” rhetoric. And not without some violence; three of the nuts attacked Capitol Police officers.
Tlaib was censored. Not expelled.
And the escalation by the Squad continues.
This time, it’s Bowman again.
The point is that these people get worse and worse, for two reasons: first, they belong to a political movement that is so utterly radical that it recognizes no limits to its excesses, and second, no outside actor has moved to create the kinds of consequences that would temper and moderate their lunacy.
This isn’t just about The Squad. It’s happening all over society. We won’t invest resources into upholding standards, and so those crumble around us. People dress like slobs, they treat each other horribly, and rates of obesity, gambling, drug abuse, alcoholism, divorce, child abuse, and countless other social ills have skyrocketed.
On Thursday, I did a podcast interview with Dr. Randall Bock about Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama, and this issue of failing to impose consequences or even remotely push back against abuse and radicalism (Barack Obama’s two terms as president were a case study in that) featured pretty prominently in the discussion.
As discussed in the interview, in politics, it’s the radicalism. And things are so topsy-turvy that when an Elon Musk, for example, suggests that refusing to “trans” a kid, or promoting a balanced federal budget, or insisting that our cities don’t become crime-infested sewers strewn about with fecal matter and used hypodermic needles, replete with homeless bums and carjackers and organized gangs of looters replacing shoppers in their stores, he’s derided as a “right-winger” for his trouble.
Musk was asking for basic standards. To enforce basic standards, there have to be consequences for failing to meet them. And everything about the modern Democrat Party is about escaping such standards.
Use abortion for birth control, because you’re using sex for entertainment. Deny the consequences of both — and those consequences are real, and they will come. But when they do, there’s a therapeutic, redistributive government to make it all better.
Rinse and repeat.
There is no such thing as a consequence-free life. One purpose of civilization is to harness and control the consequences of bad behavior in ways that might contain its impact.
But we’re losing that. We don’t hold political leaders, or our rich elites (hey, have we ever seen the list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients we’ve been asking for?) responsible for bad deeds, and so the bad deeds multiply.
And what we get is a society that’s crumbling.
We get Jamaal Bowmans and Rashida Tlaibs multiplying as members of Congress. We get Sam Bankman-Frieds running scams where productive commerce should be. We get charlatans and bums in charge of cultural institutions like Disney.
And three-quarters of us tell polling organizations what we can see and feel: the results are unacceptable. The country is on the wrong track and our civilization is dying.
Well, those are the consequences writ large of failing to impose consequences for the bad acts writ small. Go from broken-windows policing to defunding the police, and what you get is chaos. Prosecute the Daniel Pennys instead of the criminal marauders on the streets and in the subways and what you get is a wake for Jonathan Diller. Fail to uphold property rights in the cities and what you get is a squatter epidemic across the country, or roving bands of looters utterly destroying urban retail.
We’re suffering large consequences because we lack the will — and in the case of the Left, the motivation, or worse, the recognition of the bad act as bad — to impose them on a small scale.
You can’t avoid consequences forever. They will come. A society has rules for a reason. And we’re rediscovering that basic lesson more and more as things fall apart in America.
READ MORE from Scott McKay:
The Spectacle Ep. 89: Our Intelligence Agencies Went Rogue. Now They Feel Threatened.
The Ever-Continuous Villaining of Joe Biden and His Minions
James Carville and the Has-Been’s Lament
