Last October and November, Just Stop Oil climate activists engaged in rolling stoppages of London’s busy traffic as police stood by politely. As public fury bubbled and intensified, some motorists resorted to direct action to drag and remove the protestors. The police cautioned the frustrated motorists against assaulting protestors.

On 1 May, there was a fatal encounter on a New York subway between Daniel Penny, a 24-year-old Marine veteran, and 30-year-old Jordan Neely, a homeless man whose agitated and erratic behaviour appeared threatening. Confronted with such uncomfortable and potentially violent situations, most people avoid eye contact and shuffle away in quiet embarrassment. Penny chose to intervene in the interests of public safety, subdued Neely and put him in a chokehold. Neely died. No one has suggested Penny intended to kill Neely. On 12 May Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg filed charges against Penny for second-degree manslaughter. If convicted, which will require a jury to find that Penny engaged in reckless conduct, he could face 15 years in prison. Bragg’s previous high-profile court appearance was the indictment of Donald Trump by elevating misdemeanours into felonies. Before that, Bragg had attracted notoriety for reducing large numbers of felony charges to misdemeanours and freeing the arrested persons back on the streets, becoming ‘the public face of lawlessness and violence on America’s city streets’ (William McGurn in the Wall Street Journal).

The white-on-black death feeds into the BLM narrative that demands Penny must be punished. Neely was a mentally troubled and emotionally unstable man who wasn’t given adequate medical care by the city. Ensuring public safety through law enforcement and criminal justice is a prime responsibility of the state. Subway crime has exploded in New York City in recent years. Penny may have stepped in as a ‘Good Samaritan’ (Ron DeSantis) to help contain a deteriorating situation. His indictment will convince even more citizens not to get involved. The lines between fear of being assaulted, of entanglement in the criminal justice system, and cultivated indifference to events unfolding around you are blurry. Conversely, even if it turns out the city scapegoated Penny for its own dereliction of duty, no one will be held to criminal account. This is a perverse incentive structure. As someone commented: ‘If he was identifying himself as a female and wearing a dress and eye makeup and did the exact same thing he would be invited to the White House by Biden and Harris.’

In the UK, the case of Andrew Bridgen MP is equally illustrative of punishing anyone who dares to point to a dereliction of duty by the organs and officers of state. In April he was expelled from the ruling Conservative party for having dared to touch, in Parliament, the third rail of Covid-19 vaccine harms. In January he tweeted a consultant cardiologist saying that mass vaccination was the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust. A top party official said the comment had ‘crossed a line’ and PM Rishi Sunak condemned it as ‘utterly unacceptable’. The critics need remedial lessons in logical reasoning and history. Bridgen had quoted Dr Josh Guetzkow, a Jewish Israeli academic, not expressed his own thoughts. Guetzkow insisted that ‘there is nothing at all antisemitic about his statement’. A group of 25 Jewish scientists, doctors and researchers from Canada, UK, and the US wrote an open letter to Sunak on 30 January accusing Bridgen’s critics of deflecting legitimate concerns over vaccine safety and efficacy by raising charges of anti-semitism. ‘Weaponisation of the important issue of antisemitism for these purposes is particularly objectionable and disrespectful towards its victims’, they said. Bridgen did not relativise the Holocaust. The word ‘since’ doesn’t imply vaccine harms are equivalent to the Holocaust. Rather, he used the latter as the temporal benchmark: the last, bigger crime against humanity. A group of experts defended his speech to Parliament on the risks-benefits equation of Covid vaccines. Meanwhile the vaccine manufacturers have been granted immunity for any damage caused by their ‘completely safe and effective’ products.

Moira Deeming has similarly been banished from the Victorian Liberal party’s parliamentary caucus for being guilty by association. On 18 March, she spoke at a ‘Let Women Speak’ rally outside the state parliament that also featured Posie Parker (Kellie-Jay Keen Minshull). The rally was infiltrated by masked neo-Nazis dressed in menacing black whom the police seemed to guide towards the women’s rally, instead of keeping the two groups apart. Dan Andrews immediately conflated the two groups but, surprisingly, so did Liberal leader John Pesutto. He held Deeming guilty by association because of her involvement with people ‘associated with far right-wing extremist groups including neo-Nazi activists’. His efforts to expel her from the party failed in April but did succeed at the second attempt on 12 May. In turn she intends to sue him for defamation for the Nazi sympathiser smear. David Adler, president of the Australian Jewish Association, wrote a powerful piece in her defence that sharply criticised the weaponisation of the Nazi smear.

Parker’s Canberra rally was disrupted by protestors. The ACT and federal police failed to protect her during her Canberra event as the small pro-women’s group was the target of vitriolic abuse from trans-activists hurling obscenities at them: ‘F..k off Fascists! Go home Nazis!’ Tatum Street, a co-organiser of and marshal at the Canberra event, adds: ‘One of the counter-protesters, a strongly built man wearing a grey tracksuit, was filmed making kissing lips at the female marshals, his erection clearly visible through his pants. I was verbally abused by another young man, screaming, “Show us your p–sy, you p–sy pervert!”’

Finally, in the US, Baltimore became the latest city to sue car manufacturers Hyundai and Kia for an explosion in car thefts, up 95 per cent from a year ago. In their minds this is clearly not a failure of civic duties on the part of city authorities – a $22-million cut in the police budget in 2020 amidst ‘defund the police’ demands, release of criminals and an exodus of officers because of low morale – but the result of cost-cutting by the two companies in not installing more effective anti-theft devices in their cars. Mayor Brandon Scott and Police Commissioner Michael Harrison said Kia and Hyundai must to be held accountable for the rise in thefts of their cars. What next? Retail outlets being sued for not making it harder for shoplifters and looters? Oh wait. Police are already billing event organisers for protection against threats from protestors.

All these incidents of victim bashing and blame shifting responsibility for the failures of the core functions of government are symptoms of social anomie and dystopian politics afflicting contemporary Western civilisation.