In the preface to his latest book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, Gad Saad implores readers to “[i]magine for a moment that the West’s intelligentsia, including its elitist progressive political class, is infected by a mind parasite that causes its empathy module to misfire in every conceivable manner.” The result, writes Saad, is “a society that is galloping rapidly toward the abyss of infinite lunacy.”
As Dr. Saad would surely agree, members of the West’s “intelligentsia” are not necessarily all that intelligent, a fact that Karen Bass has incandescently exemplified. Her middling intellect has not impeded her long career among the elitist progressive political class, including stints in the California State Assembly, the U.S. House of Representatives, and, since December 2022, as mayor of Los Angeles, from which office she is indeed whipping Los Angeles on its gallop toward the abyss of infinite lunacy.
For evidence of this, look to a recent Los Angeles Times story, in which the mayor lamented the death of Alejandro Garcia, 33, at the hands of LAPD officers. The story quotes Bass as saying the shooting was avoidable if “the officers were trained differently or better.”
Rubbish. But it gets worse. “Bass said it would have been appropriate,” writes Times reporter Libor Jany, “for the department to deploy a unit that sends a social worker out with officers when responding to calls involving a person in crisis.” “You knew before,” says the mayor, “that [Garcia] had a bat and he was going around smashing cars.”
It’s worth noting that in presenting the story, Jany and his editors (if there are any such people at the L.A. Times these days) failed to include a link to the LAPD’s public video of the incident, in which it is made clear that Garcia, in addition to smashing cars with the bat, had tried but failed to attack people as he made his way along streets just west of downtown L.A. I have written often on the history of hostility the L.A. Times has for law enforcement in general and the LAPD in particular, and I suspect the reason for omitting the video was to shape the reader’s impressions of the shooting based on what is written about it, rather than what he can see with his own eyes.
For example, Jany writes the following: “Body-camera video captured officers approaching 33-year-old Alejandro Garcia as he was walking through traffic on Normandie Avenue underneath the 10 Freeway overpass. Officers ordered him to drop the bat, although it’s unclear whether he heard them.”
Granted, there’s no way of knowing what a dead man may or may not have heard, but if you’ve watched the video, is there any doubt in your mind that Garcia heard the officer order him to drop the bat? And even if he didn’t, so what?
Consider: The officers were dispatched to confront a man who had been breaking car windows and menacing people with a metal baseball bat. Officers in a helicopter overhead directed them to Garcia, who was now on the center divider of Normandie Avenue where it crosses under the I-10 Freeway, a busy street with any number of people exposed to danger if Garcia were allowed to continue on his path of destruction. The officers stopped and got out of their car as Garcia advanced toward them carrying the bat. Rather than drop the bat as ordered, Garcia raised it, as if prepared to strike the driver officer with it.
Infected with the Suicidal Empathy parasite as she is, Mayor Bass envisions a world in which a social worker somehow arrives at the scene before Garcia kills or injures someone, then recites the magical incantation that persuades Garcia to drop the bat and surrender peacefully. How pitiably naïve.
Under different circumstances, the officers might have had time to deploy a beanbag shotgun or some similar “less-lethal” weapon, but note that only ten seconds elapsed between when the officers first spotted Garcia and the first gunshot. Any less-lethal weapons the officers may have had would have been in the rear compartment of their SUV, leaving insufficient time to deploy them without the risk of having the man who seemed determined to bash in their own or someone else’s brains do just that.
Another troubling paragraph in the story deserves attention:
Bass said the killings reflect, in part, a broader failure of the mental health system to get people the care they need. Also of concern, the mayor said, was the lack of training for officers on how to distinguish between symptoms caused by mental illness, physical and cognitive disabilities and drugs such as phencyclidine, or PCP, which seems to be having a resurgence on city streets.
In truth, the broader failure is that of the local government, with Mayor Bass in the lead, to prevent the thousands of drug-addled vagrants like Garcia from roaming freely all across the city and diminishing the quality of life for law-abiding residents. And whether mental illness, cognitive disability, or drug abuse brought about Garcia's behavior is of little interest to the officer who, had he not shot Garcia, would likely have been killed or severely injured. A mentally ill or drug-addicted man can swing a bat just as hard as one who is sane and sober, and no officer should be asked to accept additional risks because the person attacking him somehow impaired. Suicidal empathy for thee, Madam Mayor, but not for me.
As things now stand, Mayor Bass appears headed for defeat in November’s election, a fate she richly deserves. But her opponent is L.A. City Council member Nithya Raman, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America also incurably infected with the Suicidal Empathy parasite. The voters of Los Angeles, it appears, are about to follow the lead of those in Chicago and New York, where incompetent mayors were voted out but replaced with even more incompetent ones.
The gallop toward the abyss continues.