How One Word Became America’s Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free Card

You’re walking around a major city late at night. It’s supposed to be safe.

Suddenly, the entire street is filled with teenagers, disproportionately black, beating the living hell out of each other.

Welcome to teen takeovers, the hot new social media trend that is upending law and order and decency.

But if you comment on it, you are a racist.

Victimhood isn’t just a drug that intoxicates people with the feeling that they could get away with anything; it is used as a shield against criticism and against decency. This is how our idiot society works.

I was unfamiliar with teen takeovers until I was browsing online. My staff made me aware of this.

It is insane.

Videos from Milwaukee, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta, and Brooklyn show gigantic mobs of young people, almost all black, running through the streets, wailing on each other, and taking over intersections.

Heather Mac Donald wrote in City Journal:

Takeovers are organized on social media, with anonymous flyers summoning mass gatherings. The exact location may remain undisclosed until the last minute. The notices sometimes draw on gangster rap and Black Power imagery, featuring masked men and raised fists. Others are less ominous. A flyer for a teen “trend” (another label for the phenomenon) on a South Shore Chicago beach this spring called for “no drama” and showed a cartoon figure with its naked butt thrust out in twerking stance.

Not all takeovers devolve into violence, but when they do, social media again snaps into play. Dozens of phones are held aloft in the hope of making a viral video. Violence has acquired a performative, specular quality, as though staged for maximum circulation online.

Detroit’s Memorial Day ended with a 16-year-old and a 14-year-old getting shot. In Edmond, Oklahoma, an 18-year-old was killed, and 22 were injured. In Florida, they were in Clearwater, Tampa, and Orlando; in North Carolina, they showed up in Charlotte. They occurred in Delaware. Children’s carnivals in Illinois, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Houston have been canceled in response to mass disorder.

Cities are now proposing new tactics and laws to eliminate the so-called teen takeovers.

When it comes to these teen takeovers, which are reminiscent of the flash-mobbing that happened for years, there are two issues.

The first is teen criminality. The second is how society reacts to teen criminality. These two issues reinforce one another.

A 2023 study from the Institute for Family Studies showed that a huge percentage of this stems from single motherhood. The total crime rate in cities with high levels of single parenthood is 48% higher than in those with low levels of single parenthood.

When it comes to violent crime and homicide, cities with high levels of single parenthood have 118% higher rates of violence and 255% higher rates of homicide.

I would suggest the vast majority of teenagers participating in this sort of criminality don’t have a dad in the home. Well over 50% of all black kids in America are growing up in a home with no dad.

That is not because of racism. That is because of government-driven welfare policy over the last 60 years.

The government is not a replacement for a father. The government cannot organize late-night teen get-togethers and pretend they are the same thing as a sleepover with your friends while your dad is at home.

When the government tries to be your parents, it makes things significantly worse because it acts as a permissive parent that lets you do whatever you want.

This is not a racial issue. It’s a cultural issue. But here is what brings us to the second issue: If you comment on bad behavior by teenagers, and those teenagers are predominantly young black males, ages 15 to 34 — a demographic wildly overrepresented among violent offenders — you are deemed a racist, even if you are not talking about race.

That’s the get-out-of-jail-free card, which brings us to the second part of this conversation: what society ought to do with teen criminality.

A normal society’s reaction to all criminality is quite simple. You punish the perpetrator. It doesn’t matter who’s doing the crime or whether they’re black, white, brown, or green.

The reaction of a broken society is that we can’t punish certain types of criminals, or even notice that the crime is happening, or even cover it in the news because it might cause racism.

This is a massive societal vulnerability. And guess who preys on that massive societal vulnerability?

The people who like to violate society’s rules.

This is where the conversation always gets sensitive. So I’m going to define some terms so we’re living in the land of logic, not the land of feelings.

That’s because whenever anyone talks about race in America, immediately everyone goes to racism and the accusation that you’re engaging in racism by even acknowledging a problem.

According to the great economist-philosopher Thomas Sowell, there are three types of discrimination. Only one of them is the really bad type that you’re thinking about right now.

The first is type I-A. This is when we judge things and people based on differences in quality. You judge each person as an individual, regardless of what group that person is a part of. That’s fine. It is the kind of discrimination you do every day, such as going to a restaurant and discriminating between menu items. You’re determining which one is better, which one is worse, which one you want, and which one you don’t.

Type I-A discrimination is a totally anodyne type of discrimination where you are judging a thing or person by its individual qualities.

Type I-B discrimination is when individuals are judged by empirical evidence about the group they’re part of, despite no animosity or aversion toward particular groups. This is where you don’t have any information about the person standing in front of you, but you know the group statistics about a person who fits those characteristics.

Sowell says that’s not morally wrong. That is you operating on the basis of information you have, not operating as though you are blind to information that you have. We do that all the time too. If you take it out of the realm of race, then it makes perfect sense.

Type II discrimination is the bad type of discrimination. This is treating people negatively based on arbitrary aversions or animosity. In this case, you have no basis for treating someone badly. The group identity you’re thrusting on someone doesn’t exist, or you have a bizarre version of that group identity that is not backed by data.

Type I-B is the one that makes us uncomfortable, because we’ve taught people that noticing group differences is a problem. If you notice them, then you are immediately categorized as Type II.

I understand the impulse. We don’t want to judge people based on immutable characteristics that have no bearing on behavior. But these are two separate types of discrimination. One makes sense, and one does not. Type I-B is not Type II.

Here’s an example that has nothing to do with race.

A woman is walking down the street at 1 a.m. A young man, no race mentioned, is coming toward her, walking down the street wearing a hoodie. She crosses the street.

If there had been a young woman walking down the street in the same hoodie, the first woman wouldn’t have crossed the street. Is that because she’s a sexist, or is that because she’s operating on the data that she has, which is that men are typically more likely than women to inflict violence on women late at night walking down the street?

It may turn out that the dude in the hoodie is actually a mathematician at MIT and the lady is a serial killer. But without individual data, she has to operate on the group data she has.

What we have trained people to do in Western civilization — to have an abundance of caution and a fear of our own innate racism — is to be moronic. Now you are a racist or a sexist if you make a decision based on group data in the absence of individual data. If you do Type I-B discrimination, you are somehow the bad guy.

This is what villains prey on. A villain would act in ugly, antisocial, criminal ways, but when you point it out, he would say that you’re only judging him that way because you’re engaging in Type II discrimination — baseless, evidence-free discrimination.

But you’re not even engaging in Type I-B discrimination. You’re engaging in Type I-A discrimination. You’re judging them as an individual. You’re saying, “You did a criminal thing. You should go to jail. And anyone who does criminal things should go to jail.”

This is not racist. But we have taught a huge swath of Americans that if they accuse you of racism, they can get away with literally anything.

This has become extremely common in everyday life.

Everyone ought to play by the rules, and it is not racist to say so.

And it is disgusting to charge people with racism for saying that.