The Hypocrisy of the Left

Hypocrisy is simply a subspecies of dishonesty. Leftists are constitutionally incapable of honesty so they are natural hypocrites.

From The European Conservative

By Sven R. Larson

People on the left are extremely self-centered. That explains why this elected Democratic party representative in Minneapolis did not see her own monumental hypocrisy.

There is nothing more self-centered than an American leftist, and no better example than Shivanti Sathanandan, a Democrat politician in Minneapolis. After the George Floyd tragedy is simply a subspecies of dishonesty in 202ris0, she wanted to virtue signal about what a good woman she was. She went out and about and told everyone who wanted to listen that it was time to “dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department” entirely. Fox News reports:

We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. Say it with me. DISMANTLE. The. Minneapolis. Police. Department.

She also said that the police “have failed ALL OF US” and that she wanted “to build a new infrastructure that works for ALL communities.”

The fact that she does not know what “infrastructure” means is just a comical cherry on top of the absurdity that begins here. What she really wanted to say was that she wanted to “build a new” public safety service. 

But let us leave that aside and fast forward to early September 2023. According to Fox News, Ms. Sathanandan was recently attacked outside her home by four young males with guns. They wanted her car, they assaulted her, and she had to fight to save her two children in the process. 

On her Facebook page, Ms. Sathanandan writes:

Yesterday my children and I were violently car jacked in the driveway of our home in Minneapolis. Four very young men, all carrying guns, beat me violently down to the ground in front of our kids. The young men held our neighbors up at gunpoint when they ran over and tried to help me. All in broad daylight. 

This is of course a horrible experience that nobody should have to live through. I am relieved to see that Ms. Sathanandan and her children escaped the ordeal with as little injury and trauma as they did. 

With that said, Ms. Sathanandan has served us all with a picture-perfect example of the deeply rooted hypocrisy that is American leftist politics. I hope this Democrat learns something from all this, though I doubt that she will. The very least we can do, though, is to use her experience as an example of why Democrats in general, and young, foolish political romanticists like Ms. Sathanandan in particular, should never be trusted with any levers of government power.

Before we get there, though, let us listen a little bit more to her Facebook post on the matter:

These men knew what they were doing. I have NO DOUBT they have done this before. Yet they are still out on OUR STREETS. Killing mothers. Giving babies psychological trauma that a lifetime of therapy cannot erase. With no hesitation and no remorse. 

Really? Criminals who make a career out of being criminals? What a concept. Has Ms. Sathanandan never heard about that before? When she was out roaming the streets, demanding that Minneapolis dismantle its police department—because that is what she demanded—was she entirely unaware of the fact that there are career criminals out there?

Perhaps she was unaware of it, though a far more likely explanation for her virtue-signaling demands to dismantle the police department is that she wanted to look good. She wanted to surf the tides of public opinion in the hopes that it would elevate her to public glory.

It is hard to say this, but Ms. Sathanandan appears to not care the slightest about other moms with little children who, before her, have been victims of vicious assaults committed by young career criminals. If she had cared about them, she would not have demanded the dismantling of the police department in the first place. 

Instead, this naive young leftist politician, who, according to Fox News, is the second vice chair of the Democratic party in Minneapolis, goes around behaving like she and George Floyd are the only victims ever of a violent crime.

And now for her suggestion how to solve the newly discovered problem with career criminals:

We need to get illegal guns off our streets, catch these young people who are running wild creating chaos across our city and HOLD THEM IN CUSTODY AND PROSECUTE THEM. … Look at my face. REMEMBER ME when you are thinking about supporting letting juveniles and young people out of custody to roam our streets instead of HOLDING THEM ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS.

There is just one problem with this rant. The venerable Ms. Sathanandan has spent years actively supporting the very same policies that she is now railing against. She has voted people into all kinds of places, from the city council and the district’s attorney’s office up to President Biden, who think that tough-on-crime policies are racist.

In her campaign to dismantle the police department in Minneapolis, Ms. Sathanandan has actively supported the very policies that let her four assailants “roam” the streets and “run[ning] wild” instead of being locked up. 

Again, it is good to know that she and her kids escaped this ordeal as unscathed as they did, but her high-pitched rant against crime reeks of hypocrisy from start to finish. This woman has herself helped create the four young thugs that assaulted her and her children. Before she yells to the rest of the world to rally behind her newfound tough-on-crime attitude, she needs to take a long, hard look in the mirror. If she does it honestly, she will not like what she sees, but she will hopefully grow from the experience.

Iemphasize “hopefully.” In reality, I do not believe that Ms Sathanandan will learn anything from what she has just been through. She goes on her anti-crime rant without the slightest reference to her own campaign against police and the very institutions that fight crime. In her indignant effort to sound like Rudy Giuliani, the crime-fighting New York master mayor of the 1990s, this young Democrat puts herself in the center of the crime epidemic that plagues Democrat-run cities around America. 

In doing so, she wipes out the thousands of young black mothers in Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Baltimore, and Los Angeles who live every day in the thick of the crime spree that Ms. Sathanandan and her party have created. By making herself the focal-point victim of career criminals in her own city, this young lady shoves to the side every victim of crime in Minneapolis since the day she herself joined the political assault on the Minneapolis police department. That very same political assault led to a precipitous loss of police officers to retirement, and an erosion of the MPD’s ability to serve their community. 

This is a typical character trait of leftists in general, especially young ones. They are exceptionally self-centered. Everything they experience matters to the world, and nothing the world experiences matters to them. They think they have everything to teach the world, and nothing to learn from it. 

When Ms. Sathanandan wanted to show what a good person she was back in 2020, she demanded that the police department in her city be dismantled. Let us not kid ourselves what this means: she wanted all the operations of the police to end. She wanted the police officers to be fired, all the equipment of the police to be sold off, all the police stations closed, and all the crime-fighting work that the police did, to cease. Instead, she wanted some fluffy, romantic, unspecified function to step in, a function that sounded good on paper but was so unrealistic that not even political romanticists like Ms. Sathanandan herself could explain what it was.

Despite the inability of the police-hating Left to explain their alternative, I would urge Ms. Sathanandan to please lean back for a moment and imagine what she really would like that replacement function to look like. I urge her to consider what she imagines that it would have done to prevent the crime that she was the victim of. If it could not prevent the crime (which is more than likely), I would like her to consider how her police replacement system would have helped her as a crime victim.

Would it have brought these four young criminals to justice? Would it have held them accountable, as she wants law enforcement to do?

We sensibly minded conservatives know the answers to these questions. We know that there is no replacement for law enforcement. The problems that leftist political dreamers wanted to solve had nothing to do with law enforcement itself. George Floyd did not die because the police department in Minneapolis was a systemic failure. He died because one man, who obviously should never have been a police officer, was allowed to enforce the law he had only contempt for.

That, however, is not a systemic problem of policing. That is a problem symptomatic of a lazy government bureaucracy. Policing is a government monopoly, and monopolies get sloppy at maintaining their standards of operations at all turns. The system itself may still be working, but its standards are not enforced to the full extent.

In short: while most police officers in Minneapolis did a diligent job, there were exceptions that were allowed to remain on duty—for no more dramatic reason than what we see in every government bureaucracy. The people higher up in the bureaucracy care more about their retirement benefits than about enforcing systemic standards in all instances. 

Subpar police work was not properly addressed, or George Floyd would have been alive today.

To see the difference between a systemic problem and dysfunctional components, let us step away from law enforcement for a moment. Ever since Franklin D Roosevelt was president, Democrats have had a dream about government taking over America’s entire health care system. I assume that Ms. Sathanandan is as true to her party’s ideology here as she was when she demanded the dismantling of police. In other words, I assume that she wants a government medical-service monopoly. 

Suppose we did create a single-payer health care system here in America. This would mean rationing of health care, just as it does in countries that currently have a government medical monopoly. Government bureaucrats decide who lives and who dies because there aren’t enough beds, doctors, and medical supplies to care for everyone. 

Suppose a black man in Minneapolis dies while on a waiting list for surgery, because he did not get it in time. Would this lead Ms. Sathanandan to run around the streets of Minneapolis demanding the dismantling of the government health monopoly? 

Ironically, in this case, that would be the appropriate reaction. Health care is a different system than law enforcement, which cannot be privatized (to see why, consult Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia). Health care, on the other hand, is best run when in private hands. 

The problem with leftists is that they never do a systemic analysis of whatever part of society they want to ‘reform’ at the moment. Their focus is entirely on themselves, not the community or society in which they live. True to their beliefs that they are the center point of the world, they will change moral beliefs, policy points, and even ideological principles if it can keep the spotlight of the world on them. 

That is what Shivanti Sathanandan has done. She went from hating police and wanting to tear down a system that is essential to civilized society to demanding more of that very same system. She made her about-face not because other moms had been victims of vicious crimes before her, but because it benefited herself to do so. 
If Ms. Sathanandan has proven anything, it is that we cannot, should not, and must not place the powers of government in the hands of people like her. Their unrelenting self-centeredness puts themselves above the people they serve. Unable to understand cause and effect, they turn everything they touch into California. We cannot let that happen to America.