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Chicago Mayor Johnson is an advocate of looting. Mass looting. He defends and excuses criminal organized theft as “an outbreak of incredible frustration and anguish” caused by “a failed racist system.” In short, tantrums in the form of mob violence and theft are to be expected. As one overloaded looter shouted to a news crew, "This is reparations!"
Highly organized gangs apparently think it's morally virtuous to steal from large retailers. They are developing extremely sophisticated plans for how to rapidly pillage and plunder major retailers. The best of these plans clean out a retailer in just minutes from invasion to retreat. The stolen goods are then resold online or in the streets, and the total losses are huge and growing, largely because the thieves are praised by virtue-signalers, and ignored by police and judges. Losses to honest businesses? Staggering...and growing.
TARGET reported $763 million in theft loss last fiscal year. They estimate this year's loss to be $1.2 billion. That's only one chain.
Walmart decided to shut 17 of its stores across nine states after CEO Doug McMillon warned in December that theft was the highest it’s ever been around the country and if it did not slow down, stores would have to close.
So far, more than 2,600 businesses have left downtown Portland. An 83-year-old Vietnam veteran felt safer walking the streets of pagan Saigon than he does walking the streets of Christian Portland.
Or maybe Portland is no longer Christian, because Portland no longer hears ethical truth from Christian churches, like, "thou shalt not covet, thou shalt not steal, and thou shalt not kill."
Today marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of fiction author Jane Austen, who examined ordinary, day-to-day, small-town family life within an Overton window-frame which once included Biblical civilization and ethics.
The world of Jane Austen's generation was rapidly pivoting the Overton window to a secular worldview, and so were the cultures of contemporary nations.
Lord David Cecil, a biographer of Miss Austen, noted this comparison between authors:
"If I were in doubt as to the wisdom of one of my actions, I should not consult Flaubert or Dostoyevsky. The opinion of Balzac or Dickens would carry little weight with me: were Stendhal to rebuke me, it would only convince me I had done right: even in the judgment of Tolstoy I should not put complete confidence. But I should be seriously upset, I should worry for weeks and weeks, if I incurred the disapproval of Jane Austen."
"We are smack in the middle of a Fourth Turning, and the turmoil of it all has affected the entire West. Over the last five years, virtually every major institution has disgraced itself. What used to be a high-trust society has been blown to smithereens, and nobody knows what to think anymore. And even when an individual person’s convictions haven’t changed, despite the societal turmoil, it is very difficult to know who to think those convictions with. This implosion of all the trusted institutions and relationships has of course included those of us on the political right.
"...So what am I saying? When being normal is weird, be normal. When being normal is normal, remember why you should be normal, and be prepared to defend it, which cannot be done apart from Christ. And when being normal is weird, don’t be extra weird. Be extra normal. Normal you say? By what standard? To the law and to the testimony. Exactly so."
Doug Wilson
