El Salvador: Why the Left Is Effectively Pro-Criminal
"Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent" - Adam Smith
Back in May 2023, Tim Pool made the point on his show1 to a shitlib democratic socialist that when Daniel Penny “acts in self-defense of others and the person [Jordan Neely] dies in the process”, now there's all of a sudden calls for ’okay so this guy should be criminally charged’. But there was no call for stopping the 25 people being pushed on the subway tracks. ‘That’s an ongoing and acceptable thing.’”
While Lance (the shitlib democratic socialist) quickly countered that no one thinks it is acceptable to violently push people onto subway tracks, that is a slight misunderstanding of Tim Pool’s point. When Tim made the statement “That’s an ongoing and acceptable thing”, he did not literally mean that leftists are in support of subway murders. The point was that when a belligerent criminal ends up dead after tasting some self-defense, all of the left’s sympathy is with the criminal, while dozens of completely innocent murder victims never obtain their attention. Therefore, it could easily be perceived that leftists think it is acceptable for such murders to happen, because they never say a word of condemnation about it, while at the same time clutching their pearls over a textbook act of self-defense.
One could think that it is unfair to label such a pathology as “pro-criminal”, seeing as these leftists are not acting in direct support of the criminals or criminals’ actions. But one could easily infer from this pathology that such leftists have little to no empathy for clear victims of crime, and have all the fervent and indignant support in the world for criminals like Jordan Neely. Even a far-left publication like The Nation addressed this sort of selective heartlessness:
Under the statements and statistics are real individuals and families facing pain and loss as a result of violence in their neighborhoods.
Too often, progressives are characterized as not caring about that pain, because, too often, progressives are quick to minimize the realities of crime and violence because of the compassion inherent in progressive ideology and policy.
Certainly, this is only one small instance, but to more effectively make my point, allow me to present the case of El Salvador. Running back decades the MS-13 and Barrio 18 street gangs have made the lives of the country’s inhabitants an absolute living hell. Such gangs have unleashed such terrible violence and extortion that until recently, most people were too afraid to even walk around outside or in public. This small country of 6.5 million people was the Northern Hemisphere’s murder capital with “one of the highest homicide rates anywhere in the world outside of a war zone.”
After a bloody day on March 26, 2022, where it is claimed 62 people were killed by gangs, president Nayib Bukele instituted some admittedly stringent measures to fix the problem. Common civil liberties were suspended, like the right to an attorney, the right of association, and the right to be told the reason for one’s arrest, as well as protections against government intervention in the mail or phone calls against any suspected gang members.
Such measures have clearly worked. According to analysts consulted by The New York Times, “[h]omicides plunged. Extortion payments imposed by gangs on businesses and residents, once an economy unto itself, also declined.” In fact, León Krauze in The Washington Post has observed that “citizens report that extortion has all but disappeared.” Also, The Wall Street Journal summarizes things pretty well here:
Since March 2022, President Nayib Bukele’s government has implemented a campaign to arrest en masse suspected members of the MS-13 and 18th Street gangs that have long terrorized the impoverished Central American nation, blocking economic growth and stoking U.S.-bound migration.
The strategy has helped lower homicides by 92% compared with 2015, giving Bukele the support of nine of every 10 Salvadorans, polls show. The number of Salvadorans illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border has dropped by 44%.
Some 66,000 people have been seized and hauled off to prisons under these measures, eating into the formerly 70,000-strong gang army. Numerous eyewitness accounts describe the almost unbelievable calm that ensued after President Bukele cracked down. Bukele has also consistently enjoyed astronomical approval ratings, with many articles placing it at 90%. Presidential candidates in Guatemala have also voiced support for Bukele’s methods.
Sure, there are valid questions about the reliability of such high approval numbers, the sustainability of such extreme methods, and the unfortunate arrests of innocent people who were not gang members. But as El Salvador’s vice president Felix Ulloa explained, “There’s a margin of error”. He adds that “People can go out, they buy things, go to the movies, to the beach, they see soccer games. We’ve given people back their liberty.” Personally, I would add that the highly regrettable and unfortunate deaths of some wrongly imprisoned people are a lesser evil compared to the nonstop tyranny and bloodshed committed against innocents for many decades prior.
Substack writer Richard Hanania has also pretty definitively argued why the trade-off between due process and the criminal crackdown has been worth it, so to be concise, I will not reiterate his points here.
Some could argue that the aforementioned margin of error is way too big, especially given the conditions of the prisons these arrestees are thrown into. But it is clear that the ordinary people of El Salvador do not care, because they can actually live a normal life now. And more crucially, ordinary people, understandably, have absolutely no sympathy for the bastards being thrown into these prisons. The fact that El Salvador’s law-abiding population had been killed and immiserated by tens of thousands of psychopaths never seemed to catch much attention from the civil-liberties-thumping left wing. However, when such psychopaths (along with occasional innocents) are placed in miserable incarceration conditions, that is when the pro-criminal left squeals and brays.
It reveals a strange situation where the business-casual-dressed academics and “experts” who live and work in communities completely disconnected from the carnage of criminality have far more sympathy and concern for evil lawbreakers than the poor people who actually have to live with such lawbreakers. For example, David Simon, the leftist creator of the 2000s HBO show The Wire, refreshingly pointed out that:
the only people I hear arguing that all policing is oppression or that any effort to maintain any law or order are never people trying to raise families, or reside or work in West Baltimore or Eastside or Pimlico or Cherry Hill. They are either academics, commentators or ideologues who very much live elsewhere. The people I hear from want the shooters to be locked the fuck up.
Such understandable vitriol toward criminals is also seen in Haiti, where the gangs (atrocious in their own right) also collude and collaborate with the nation’s police, leaving the civilian population few options apart from straight-up vigilantism. Amusingly, in one incident some Haitians even overpowered the cops, rounded up 14 gang suspects, and used gasoline to burn them alive. Such killings have resulted in “a sharp drop in kidnappings and killings attributed to gangs in neighborhoods where people . . . had been afraid to leave their homes”, according to The New York Times.
So in light of such information, when the most that can be summoned from one’s lips is some concern about the civil rights of the gang members (perhaps after some throat-clearing about the obvious benefits of the anti-crime measures), then that is a sign of bad priorities. I chuckled when I read that Christine Wade, an interviewed expert on El Salvador, said she was “incredibly pessimistic about what this means for the future of democracy in the region”, fearing that Bukele’s method will become “a popular model for other politicians to say, ‘Well, we could be providing you more security in exchange for you giving up some of your rights.’”
Without any shred of self-awareness. I do not know much about her, and I doubt I can find a source that confirms this, but I can state with confidence that Wade was perfectly fine with the catastrophic COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates that flagrantly violated any pretense of civil liberties. Wade may argue that such measures were necessary to combat the pandemic, but precisely the same thing could be said of President Bukele’s methods toward gang violence. Especially ironically, Bukele’s strategy resulted in ordinary people being able to freely leave their homes, while the COVID lockdowns kept virtually everyone locked up like a caged animal.
With all that said, any moral-high-ground-having claim of civil liberties from the pro-criminal left rings incredibly hollow when they only seem to reserve their sympathy for brazen violators of the law, while victims of criminal atrocities are seemingly never worth the condolences. Undoubtedly, members of this pro-criminal faction justify their sympathy by claiming the role of some paragon that strives to defend the rights of those that nobody else will stick up for. Indeed, even Ted Bundy deserved the best defense that the law could provide him. But in the same vein as the saying “that’s a face only a mother could love”, Jordan Neely and the reprehensible marauders of El Salvador, Haiti, and Baltimore are people only a leftist would have any sympathy for.
For sure, these leftists do not support any of the actions of these people, but they seem to care more about those marauders’ rights than the rights of those that have to suffer at their hands every day. The one and only Adam Smith made clear that “mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent”, and while the pro-criminal left might imagine that they are doling out the majority of their mercy to the correct people, the true innocents are still waiting for what’s theirs.
Time-stamp: 9:10 - 9:28