It’s a standard pattern. After a horror like the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting, pundits, journalists and politicians come forward to say that the event is evidence of some deep moral failure, a flaw in America’s soul. Predictably enough, of course, they then preach that salvation can only come by doing what they want.
But when the facts come in, it invariably turns out that the tragedy doesn’t stem from a spiritual failing in America but rather from the fact that some (most?) of our institutions are run by creeps, crooks and incompetents.
We’ve learned that a door was propped open or left unlocked at Robb Elementary School (the story keeps changing on what exactly happened), allowing the shooter to enter the building.
We’ve also discovered the Uvalde police — despite well-established doctrine that a mass shooter must be confronted immediately by whoever is at hand — hung back for nearly an hour while children were murdered inside. We’ve seen chilling timelines showing repeated cellphone calls from students trapped inside, wondering why no one was coming to help.
And we’ve seen video of the police not simply failing to protect the children but blocking (and even arresting) parents who tried to get past them to help their kids. When a tactical response team from a nearby US Border Patrol unit showed up, the police even stopped it from going to the rescue right away.
The Uvalde police and school district are stonewalling the investigation into their actions, refusing to cooperate with Texas authorities. Pete Arredondo, the police chief, hasn’t responded to investigators in days — though, incredibly, he did show up to get sworn in as a Uvalde city councilmember.
These children didn’t die because there’s some sort of dark moral stain on the American soul. They died because the people in charge of protecting them were cowards and frauds, and now those cowards and frauds are trying to avoid responsibility.
We saw the same thing with the Parkland school shooting in Broward County, Fla., where once again a dangerous student was repeatedly let off the hook by fashionably lax disciplinary policies until he committed mass murder. Then, when he did, the police were cowards who hid outside.
Yet there too, we were told that the real problem was a moral failing on the part of the hundreds of millions of Americans who were not involved, rather than on the part of the shooter and those who enabled him.
Consequences, after all, are for ordinary Americans. The folks in charge are free to be failures, incompetents and worse with virtually no risk of accountability.
But then, as columnist Kurt Schlichter writes, “The new normal is failure.” “The clusterfark in Uvalde is just a symptom of a much bigger pathology. It is a symbol of the failure of every institution in our society,” he says. “And the solution is never to revamp the institutions and eject the parasites heading them. It’s always — always — to take power from us and give it to the people who screwed up in the first place.”
It seems like these killers — Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz and Uvalde shooter Salvador Ramos, among many others — were known to be problems well before but weren’t properly dealt with. Then, once the shooting started, the police hid behind cars and let children die.
Forget the thin blue line — in Uvalde, as in Broward, it was a thin yellow line.
But I don’t mean to just pick on cops. A year ago, the US embassy in Kabul was flying a Pride flag. A few months later, there was no US embassy in Kabul, as the United States made a humiliating withdrawal, a military defeat of cosmic proportions.
Just this week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen admitted that she had been “wrong” on the threat posed by inflation. Last year she had said, “I think there’s a small risk, and I think it’s manageable.”
One of her top jobs is to control inflation. Everyone with a brain saw it coming in the wake of the Biden administration’s reckless spending. But she didn’t, or pretended that she didn’t, and now Americans are paying top prices for gas, groceries and all the necessities of life. Yellen hasn’t stepped down. She hasn’t even really apologized.
Our ruling class keeps failing, and somehow it’s supposed to be because of Americans’ moral failings. But if Americans have a moral failing, it’s in tolerating rule by the cast of clowns in charge of our institutions.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
