Washington Post writer Maura Judkis is under fire this week for a column in which she mocks shoplifting stories as the “moral panic” of a nation built on “stolen land.” It is reminiscent of those who excused rioting in past summers “as an expression of power” and demanded that the media refer to looters as “protesters.” Now, the Washington Post is suggesting that it may be just desserts for a nation of colonizers and enslavers.
The prior day, the Post ran another column downplaying accounts of stores closing due to shoplifting even though employees blamed rampant shoplifting in San Francisco. There have been increasing store closures where the owners have cited the problem of rising crimes. Indeed, in D.C., I recently spoke with the owner of a popular restaurant who is closing because of the rampant crime threatening his customers and employees.
In cities like New York and Washington, consumers are now faced with locked away merchandise requiring an employee to assist in obtaining items. Stores did not take that extreme action because shoplifting is a myth or exaggerated.
Judkis wrote a Friday piece entitled “The zombie CVS, a late-capitalism horror story.” The hook was another store being looted in D.C. Judkis matter-of-factly describes how
“Everything else that remains in the store in Northwest D.C., which is not much, is under plexiglass: Dawn dish soap, L’Oreal shampoo, MiraLax, a handful of Clairol root touch-up hair dye kits, flu season combo packs of DayQuil and NyQuil. The diapers are behind the counter. The Cetaphil and Neutrogena face washes are under lock and key. Other shelves, stretching entire aisles, are totally empty. “
The reason for those extreme measures is brushed over. Instead, Judkis uses the story to mock such coverage as “a horror story of Late Capitalism” in which “the empty CVS had somehow become a stand-in for all that is wrong with American cities — and liberals (and liberal democracy?) — in 2024.”
She then adds “America is a sticky-fingered nation built on stolen land, and its current moral panic is about shoplifting. It’s not just a worry in Columbia Heights. All over the country, from sea to shining CVS, there are concerns about petty theft.”
She dismisses the shoplifting as a “political talking point” despite many stories citing such crime as the reason for closing stories in various cities. She questions the real basis for such moves and claims that “in certain conservative circles, there’s a wild narrative about cities as terrifying hellholes of crime, theft and lawlessness. The bleakness of the D.C. CVS played right into this belief.”
The real story, she suggests, is the economic conditions leading to shoplifting.
Other journalists have made similar objections. New York Times writer (and now Howard University Journalism Professor) Nikole Hannah-Jones, has called upon journalists to stop covering shoplifting crimes, even criticizing MSNBC’s Al Sharpton for his discussion of a viral video of a man who recently stole steaks from a New York City Trader Joe’s.
Writers like Hannah-Jones believe that reporters should actively suppress or dismiss stories on such crime to frame public opinion. It is all part of advocacy journalism. You can almost attribute the denial of reality to “a late-journalism horror story.”
Does the Washington Post realize how utterly stupid and out of touch they appear by publishing such nonsense?
Ev Hall- ”
Does the Washington Post realize how utterly stupid and out of touch they appear by publishing such nonsense?
+++
They will when the crime they cherish comes to them.
No they do not. I lived in Washington for 60 years, until I retired a few years ago and moved to the Free State of Florida. Even before Bezos, the Washington Post was a committed Communist propaganda organ.
Ahem…so much for “White Rural Rage.” The Washington Post is expressing both sides of Raging Urban Dysfunction.
The left is terrified of White rural- while living in places were there chances of being a victim of a violent crime are 3 to 4 times as high as the rest of the country.
But this is typical of the left – they are afraid of a long list of things that are impossible or unlikely and ignoring the real threats to their lives and their prosperity.
She should stop crying about stolen land and use her constitutionally protected 2nd amendment to take back what was stolen from her. Or perhaps she should be doxed and we will likely see a change in attitude when it is her stuff that is stolen.
Does Judkis think that censoring the coverage of rising crimes – including shoplifting in left wing nut controlled parts of the country will change anything ?
Stores will close – whether they crime stories are covered or not.
Nor is this a late capitalism issure – maybe more of a late socialism issue.
Regardless, no system of economics or govenrment will work if people get away with ignoring the law and stealing.
Judkis should be suing those who educated her for bring her to adulthood clueless about critical thinking.
Further – THIS IS NOT a nationwide problem – absolutely people in the 90% of the country that is NOT seeing spiking violent and property crimes are very concerned that the rising crime in other places is headed their way.
But it is not. there is no problem with Rising shoplifting throughout the US. CVS is not going out of Business, it is just leaving DC.
Further – this is not “late capitalism” – someone will sell goods to the people in these crime ridden democratic cesspools.
They will as the article note impliment measures like locking everything up, and heightened security.
That will add cost, and that cost will be passed on to consumers. So the price of goods will rise for those who can least afford it.
This is not a symptom of the failure of late capitalism – capitalism will do fine – even in democratic hellholes.
It is s symption of the failure of woke progressivism.
Ms. Judkis – and her ilk of unserious undereducated nattering nabobs of negativism (credit Nixon VPOTUS) – should read “History of the American Frontier” by Fredric L. Paxson – the Pulitzer Prize winner in 1925, it is a detailed account of the settlement of our country beginning with the earliest arrivals. Contrary to the widly held opinion that all the land was “stolen”, much of it was purchased (in surveyed parcels) from native American tribes by land speculators funded in each case by the US Congress. The speculators then subdivided the land and sold “lots” – primarily to new immigrants or eastern seaboard in search of an independent life. BTW – this book should be required reading in US high schools.
For example in my state of Washington, Governor Steven energetically headed off Indian wars by initiating a series of treaties covering the then territory of Washington including the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliot covering most of the now heavily populated lands south of Canada and west of the Cascades. The basis for this treaty resulted from the accumulated lessons learned with the experience of previous treaties including the need to have a whole raft of Indian tribes together in the agreement to ensure coverage of any competing and overlapping tribal land claims. In addition this treaty (in article 13) provides, over 10 years before the 13th amendment, for the emancipation by the tribes of any slaves and the cessation of this practice – something that is little remarked on. The impact of this treaty is felt today through the exercise of tribal fishing rights resulting in restrictions in game fishing and higher fish prices in the groceries. Yet even the locals here seem to be oblivious of this history.
Arnold Nordsieck, higher fish prices here in Washington state are the result of too few fish, not because the tribes fish in their accustomed places.
Isn’t she really ridiculing the customers? The people who frequent CVS? The vast American PEASANTRY… That’s who all the worke, all the Marxists, all our Cosmopolitan intellectuals have most contempt for. The people.
Poor Maura Judkis says “America is a sticky-fingered nation built on stolen land, and its current moral panic is about shoplifting” and is getting ‘just desserts for a nation of colonizers and enslavers’.
Presumably then, Maura would agree with this similar ‘thinking’: The Washington Post, a newspaper that not only led the country to believe that the Holocaust was not taking place, led the country to believe that the Steel dossier was the real thing and that Hunter’s laptop was a product of Russian espionage is getting its just financial rewards (as in “Washington Post set to lose ‘$100 million in 2023’ one decade after Jeff Bezos bought the paper”). Just the kind of reward one would predict for a “newspaper” and its “journalists” in a post-journalism world.
It must be a tough life for Judkis and her hand-wringing, guilt-ridden, ilk. Having to spend every waking moment looking for whatever faux outrage they can manufacture with some inane conglomeration of words.
I live in the midwest and the CVS stores are full of products and nothing is under lock and key except for shop lifters.
This is not a problem in much of the country. The dirty little not so secret of the rising crime statistics is that what looks like a 200% increase nation wide, is more like a 800% increase in the bastions of leftism. In much of the rest of the country though fear of crime is rising, actual crime is not.
All the left is doing is driving poor people to the right.
For every black mother that does not want her teenager arrested for being black,
There is a black mother of a preteen who WANTS the gang members arrested so that her preteen does not join them.
For every minority shoplifter, there are dozens of poor minorities who are paying more for the good they buy and having a much harder time buying them. Nor can government fix this through any means except enforcing the law.
If the left targets those who raise prices and increase security and inconvenience to sell good – they will just leave.
John Say said: “what looks like a 200% increase nation wide, is more like a 800% increase in the bastions of leftism”
That incorrect conclusion may have some benefit as a side-effect, as more citizens nation-wide arm themselves and, in the process, reconsider their former sympathies to anti-2A forces.
so a communist wants to nationalize everything. How original
Arrest her for inciting CRIME!
Play their game!
sounds like she is inciting insurrection. JAIL HER!
Let play the Democrat’s game!
Is not crime as kind of civil war perpetuated by elites, esp in academia, against the rest of America? It may be the modern definition of “treason”.
Maura Judkis should understand that if she wants to get to the root of the problem, she would know that it is bad political decisions that lead to bad economic circumstances. The fact that a preponderance of those bad political decisions lead to bad economic circumstances happening in many cities is just a fact that she doesn’t want to admit.
Maura Judkis should have to live in the world that she advocates for.
𝐌𝐚𝐜𝐲’𝐬 𝐔𝐧𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐒𝐪𝐮𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐬𝐚𝐲 𝐫𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐥𝐚𝐦𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐜𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐞
Employees at the Macy’s store in San Francisco’s Union Square say rampant shoplifting is to blame for the planned closure of the flagship store.
By: Garrett Leahy, George Kelly, and Joel Umanzor ~ Feb. 27, 2024
https://sfstandard.com/2024/02/27/macys-union-square-closure-rampant-shoplifting/
𝐒𝐚𝐧 𝐅𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨 𝐮𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐬 𝐒𝐮𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐧 𝐡𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐫𝐮𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠
In a filing with the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday, San Francisco came out squarely against a lower court’s decision that firmly cements restrictions on the ability to abate homeless encampments. | By: Camille Cohen/The Standard
By: Gabe Greschler ~ Mar. 01, 2024
https://sfstandard.com/2024/03/01/san-francisco-urges-supreme-court-to-overturn-homelessness-ruling/
Sometimes the gods punish us by giving us what we want.
“WE THE PEOPLE…SECURE THE BLESSINGS OF LIBERTY TO OURSELVES AND OUR POSTERITY.”
– Preamble to the Constitution
__________________________________
Illegal alien invaders are the cure that is the curse.
American women became men and stopped making Americans, causing a need for ersatz Americans.
Men persist.
Women make the men who persist.
What happens when they don’t?
A vacuum.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
Illegal alien invaders fill the vacuum that nature abhors.
They also irretrievably and “fundamentally transform” and destroy the country forever.
All America ever needed were a few temporary non-citizen, non-voting workers who would go home with their profits when their jobs were complete.
The articles and opinions you reference highlight the leftist fringe position that no individual is responsible or accountable for their standing in life, their actions, or their outcomes. Society writ large is the problem with whiteness, again writ large, a driving force. It’s always someone else’s fault that I’m not educated, not successful, not happy, and have no future. It’s certainly not my fault.
And as to this living on stolen land idiocy, a few points. Yes, European settlers did not treat native Americans well. However, those European settlers treated Native Anericans the same way Europeans treated each other – and the way Native Americans treated each other – from time out of mind. White Europeans were just better at it than Native Americans were.
The reality is that inequality, AKA survival of the fittest, is the foundation of evolution. The strongest lion gets to mate and procreate, that’s why there are still lions. Yes, human beings are more evolved, but the same rules of nature survive. The more capable man is more likely than not going to marry and have children with a more capable female, etc., etc, etc.
So why are these simple realities seemingly so offensive to leftists? Simply because they go against their fundamental belief that individuals should look towards their betters – read government, coastal media and academia – for direction on how to think, live and survive – or at least until these betters get mugged, robed or raped.
None of our present day felons were victimized by colonialism and its aftermath. These whiners and provocateurs are only the well trained tools of those whose only goal is world domination – which cannot be actualized until the hegemony of a free America has been destroyed.
I agree with her. Invaders conquered America, because the residents were not educated about property “Ownership”. If they knew then, what they know now, they would have built a wall, and sunk the #Mayflower. She lives in DC, so she can live in a free country, provided to her by people she detests. She reminds me more of AOC, saying (shoplifters) looters, are hungry, and only wanted some bread. 50 years ago, bread was a slang synonym for money.
By the author’s terminally flawed calculus, spawned wholly out of context, all land and nations throughout history were “stolen.”
An “author” with license is an inane yet incendiary novelist.
Whom did the Indians* steal America from after arriving here as nomadic Asians traversing the Alaskan Land Bridge millennia ago?
*
Article 1, Section 8
The Congress shall have Power…
To regulate Commerce with…the Indian Tribes;…
The tribe of other indians that were hunting the same land. They indians did not look at land ownership the way europeans did. They were nomadic moving from one food source to another with the seasonal migration of animals. The Souix killed the Blackfeet, they fought over the productive hunting ground. Same concept as modern day, natural resources.
Just another AWFL = Affluent White Female Liberal
I think you meant to say
Just another AWFUL = Affluent White Female Ultra Liberal
But for the “colonists” and “appropriators” of indigenous lands — BTW, the complete history of the entire planet — if the Axis powers had won WW II, those west of the Mississippi River (if alive) would likely have been forcefully “re-educated” to speak Japanese, while those east of that mighty river (also if alive) would have been required to learn and speak German.