Welcome back, and thanks for reading! As some of you, particularly our new subscribers, may know, I was just on Tim Pool’s Timcast. It was a really cool opportunity, with around half a million live viewers, but it did mean I wasn’t able to finish up the research I had planned for the paid subscribers today. That will come out on Tuesday—I apologize for the delay and appreciate your patience—but in the meantime, this is an article I was able to get done and that relates quite strongly to my thesis of why “Strong Towns” is an imbecilic book in this present environment. Enjoy! And as always, please tap the heart to “like” this article if you get something out of it, as that is how Substack knows to promote it!
Before the horrific slaying of Charlie Kirk in cold blood, a potential sign that we are headed toward a resurgence of the leftist terror-ridden 1970s, the headline news story that had normal Americans up in arms (and rightly so) was a classic case of anarchotyranny. In Charlotte, a 14-time arrestee and violent felon stabbed a white girl to death because of her race, repeatedly saying “I got that white girl” after murdering her.1
What made the story of DeCarlos Brown Jr being let out of jail by a seemingly corrupt and a co-ethnic judge2 for the fourteenth time so that he could go on to murder Iryna Zarutska all the more poignant is that it was just the latest in a long string of horrific incidents in which obvious recidivists have been treated with kid gloves only to go on to kill upstanding citizens.
Listen to the audio version of this article here:
Who could forget the case of 77-year-old grandmother Eleanor Bowles, stabbed to death in the garage of her gated condo in Atlanta’s Buckhead area by Antonio Brown, a 23-year-old homeless thug who murdered her while trying to steal her car?3 She did everything right in life, but her last years were snatched from her by a murderous thug that the (in)justice system refused to keep off the streets. Brown still hasn’t been brought to justice: the state is doing a mental health examination of him thanks to a leftist judge.4
Or what about the case of Eliza Fletcher, the young woman, mother of two, daughter of a prominent businessman, and kindergarten teacher from Memphis, who was jogging before starting her day as a young mom? She was abducted, presumably raped, murdered, and her remains left in a wretched alleyway…by a vicious thug who had already been caught and convicted of kidnapping before, in a case where he would have murdered the victim had he not escaped.5 That thug, Cleotha Abston, was released from prison and went on to kidnap Fletcher, whom he murdered. Despite his repeated crimes and the vicious murder of Fletcher, Abston has not faced the real justice of the hangman’s noose; he instead lives a cushy life in prison at taxpayer expense.6
Or what about the case of Frank Olton and Maureen Olton, an elderly and happily married couple in New York City? A “young scholar” knocked on their door and asked them to let him in to charge his phone. Kindhearted, they complied. The thug at issue, Jamel McGriff, repaid that tenderheartedness by torturing both of them to death. He tied Frank to a pole and stabbed him to death, and burned Maureen to death; she was found covered in stomach-churning burns. He also stole their credit card and used it around town before being caught.7 Jamel had a criminal record, and had only been out of prison for about a year when he committed the sickening crime.8
I could go on, and on, and on. No matter what city you are thinking of, whether it be a red city or blue city, red state or blue state, in the north or south, east or west, you can find much the same story: a horrid thug with a criminal record pages long murders some upstanding citizen in an unspeakably evil way. The thug will slay elderly grandparents or shoot a baby (De’Marquise Elkins did this to white baby Antonio West in Glynn County, GA9), plow a car into a crowd of Christians celebrating Christmas10 or abduct, rape, and murder some poor young woman.
If you have a strong stomach and want to understand what we’re up against, click here to read about the abduction, torture, and murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom.
But whatever the extraneous details, the story is always the same. The longtime thugs weren’t held accountable by the government as they committed crime after crime, wreaking (often violent) havoc in the lives of ordinary people for years on end without any repercussion of note. Emboldened by that seeming impunity, they go on to torture and kill in ways so evil it’d make Beria blush.11
And, of course, like the farm murders in South Africa,12 the perpetrators are almost always black and the victims are very often white; as Matt Walsh noted in a recent video, “a white person is 30 times more likely to be killed by a black person than the other way around.”13 As Christopher Newsom’s mother said of his sickening torture and murder at the hands of five black thugs, “If this wasn't a hate crime, then I don't know how you would define a hate crime. It may have started out as a carjacking, but what it developed into was blacks hating whites. To do the things they did, they would have to hate them to do that."14
At this point, the prevalence of those sickening crimes has grown so frequent as to essentially become state policy. For example, in many cities—such as Atlanta and NYC—there is a list the police have of about 1,000 repeat offenders who commit close to half of the crimes in each city.15 But are they locked up for good, or better yet, hanged for their crimes? No. They are released time and time again, left to commit never-ending strings of crimes. Handling them properly—forcing them to face the hangman’s noose—would essentially fix our crime problem, as it did in Europe in a civilized age,16 yet it doesn’t happen.
Why do we not lock them up? Because the Establishment is committed to the South Africanization of America—by which I mean a mixture of anarchotyranny and race communism—for its own reasons. Generally, those reasons stem from an ideological commitment to egalitarianism and equity,17 whatever the dire consequences, but other reasons abound. Some just like to see crime committed and think it’s fun or funny.18 Others actually want to start a communist revolution, and see anarchic levels of crime as the way of getting there.19 Others, opportunists, hope to cash in on the chaos by gobbling up real estate sold off because of crime at rock-bottom prices.20
Whatever the reasons, we don’t lock them up. The riots continue, the slayings happen regularly, and the stomach-churning details are ever more infuriating, particularly when killers who have been arrested fourteen times like DeCarlos Brown are transported to cushy hospitals, as he was, for their “mental health problems”21 rather than just being hanged or imprisoned for life, as would happen in a civilized society.
And the result of that is that the average American city is more dangerous than an active war zone. Yes, really.
America’s eleven deadliest cities, by the number of homicides per 100,000 people, are:22
Jackson, Mississippi (79 per 100,000 people23)
St. Louis, Missouri (69.4 per 100,000 people)
Baltimore, Maryland (51.1 per 100,000 people)
New Orleans, Louisiana (40.6 per 100,000 people)
Detroit, Michigan (39.7 per 100,000 people)
Cleveland, Ohio (33.7 per 100,000 people)
Las Vegas, Nevada (31.4 per 100,000 people)
Kansas City, Missouri (31.2 per 100,000 people)
Memphis, Tennessee (27.1 per 100,000 people)
Newark, New Jersey (25.6 per 100,000 people)
Chicago, Illinois (24.0 per 100,000 people)
By contrast, as Eugyppius noted on X, the total number of civilian deaths per 100,000 people in Ukraine during the Russo-Ukraine War is somewhere around 10 per 100,00024 (by contrast, Charlotte is 12 per 100,000) to, at the very upper end, around 22 per 100,000.25 Of course, that is just civilian casualties, not military casualties. But it does include civilians in besieged cities like Mariupol that were levelled by artillery, cities like Kiev that have been bombarded by missiles, and all the cities and towns along the frontline that are continually rocked by artillery fire, rockets, and mechanized warfare.
Yes, as was put in stark relief by the murder of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska at the hands of felonious DeCarlos Brown, America’s diverse cities are more dangerous than civilian life in the middle of a mechanized war. Artillery barrages are less deadly than the Charlotte bus system; Iryna probably would have survived life in Ukraine, but life in Charlotte was far too deadly…and Charlotte is relatively peaceful compared to other American hellholes.
The same is true of grinding urban combat and guerrilla warfare. During the 2003-11 Iraq War, life for civilians in Iraq was generally less dangerous than life in America’s most diverse and dangerous cities is for American civilians. Below is a chart Grok made of civilian deaths during the American invasion and occupation of Iraq over 2003-2011, based primarily on the Iraq Body Count Project, the largest available database of civilian deaths during the Iraq War.26 Over the course of that notoriously bloody conflict, one that witnessed not just guerrilla warfare and air strikes but also horribly bloody sectarian conflict, only two years in Iraq saw worse civilian death rates than America’s “vibrant” and diverse, blood-drenched cities.
The same is even more true of Northern Ireland during the Troubles: only one year from that notoriously violent battle of guns and pipe bombs, ambushes and sniper attacks, would have even made it into America’s current top ten most violent cities. Even that year would have come nowhere close to being as violent as our worst cities. The other years were relatively peaceful compared to America’s major cities, and most were far less violent than Charlotte.
The same is true even of the Rhodesian Bush War, which consisted mainly of guerrilla attacks on civilians. Even including the deaths of security forces troopers, police, and rebels in addition to civilian casualties, there was only one year of the Bush War that was more violent than America’s most violent cities, with most making the entire conflict nowhere close to being as violent as our worst cities.
There’s room to needle around the edges. Baghdad, for example, was about three times as violent as Iraq generally during the war, and so most years would have outcompeted America’s worst cities. Similarly, there are ways to squeeze and massage the data, deciding what deaths should and shouldn’t be included, to make a given war or city look more or less violent. The numbers Grok used are general approximations, rather than exact, so there is room to say a given year was a bit more or less violent.
But, on the whole, the point holds true: as a civilian, it is generally safer to be in a modern warzone than a “diverse” American city. Charlotte, nowhere near America’s top ten worst cities, is more deadly than the Russo-Ukraine War. Jackson and St. Louis are worse for civilians than Iraq was during its infamously violent war that saw an immense civilian death toll. The Troubles would be treated as a period of immense peace in nearly every major American city. Even the Bush War was less bloody than daily life in many American zip codes.
That is not to say that war is not cruel, or that the tragedies from it aren’t too high or tragic. It is, and they are.
But life is a game of chance, and when looking at the chances of meeting a violent end, America’s diverse cities are by and large much more violent than even active war zones like Iraq during the occupation/sectarian civil war or Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
Why is that a problem for Memphis and St. Louis, but not Vermont or New Hampshire? Well, as Matt Walsh put it in a recent video, “By raw numbers — that makes black males in America more dangerous than perhaps any other demographic in the entire world, let alone in this country.”27 And, importantly, he added, “In 2019, there were about 560,000 violent interracial incidents between blacks and whites. 470,000 of them were black on white. That's 85%”28
That is a problem that needs to be solved. We can’t keep living like this, worrying about the South Africanization of America. We won’t keep living like this. Our cities shouldn’t be more violent than active war zones, and it’s time to set about fixing the problem.
The easiest way to do so would be to stop tolerating recidivism. There is no reason that multi-time felons should ever be released from prison, much less released time and time again, as they have made it clear by their own actions that they cannot be rehabilitated. There is no way to fix them. The only options are to let them wreak more havoc, or to stop them for good. The latter is preferable, and must be made the national policy.
Thanks again for reading! If you found value in this article, please consider liking it using the button below, and upgrading to become a paid subscriber. That subscriber revenue supports the project and aids my attempts to share these important stories, and what they mean for you. Also, it gets you full access to paywalled articles, like the recent article on lessons for Americans from the Rhodesian Bush War.
Noted in Newsweek, amongst other mainstream sources: https://www.newsweek.com/iryna-zarutska-stabbing-video-attack-2126962'
Beria was the secret police chief under Stalin, and was noted even amongst the Soviets for his cruelty. For example: https://x.com/michaelmalice/status/1425987653388967936
K9 Reaper notes that signal fact about the South Africa murders here:
A Boer's View of the Crisis in South Africa
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Described in this article:
The South Africanization of America's Cities and Our Budding Debt Crisis
Welcome back, and thank you for reading! Today’s article is a subject I’ve long wanted to write about, but needed to do a good bit of research on first, so as to tackle the problem well. If you are not already a paid subscriber, please consider upgrading your subscription for just a few dollars a month to support this project and read articles like this in full; your generosity is what makes this possible, and I really appreciate it. If you find this article valuable, it would be hugely helpful if you could like it by tapping the heart at the top of the page to like the article; that’s how the Substack algorithm knows to promote it. Thanks again!
Europeans are largely non-criminals because 1-2% of each generation was executed for centuries as states weeded out the crime genes: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/147470491501300114
This seems to have been the case with Decarlos Brown and why he committed the crime: https://x.com/esrtweet/status/1965441550756053148
When the Radical Left Murdered Dozens and Bombed Thousands in the Name of Communist Revolution
Hey, everyone. Welcome back, and thank you for reading, particularly under the circumstances. Today’s article has been in the works for a while and was meant to be for paid subscribers. However, give…
You have to read between the lines, but this is suggested here, for example: https://www.planetizen.com/news/2020/07/109887-past-civil-unrest-sets-table-todays-gentrification
Newsweek left this one out, for whatever reason: https://www.axios.com/2025/08/15/homicide-rates-highest-blue-cities-red-states
Thank you, Will, for another in a long run of excellent posts, which I consider generally the most valuable material I am currently reading, since your analysis is both long-term, drawing detailed historical analogies, and also because you don't shrink from the central problem.
On one minor point of fact, Charlie Kirk (RIP) himself singled out Teresa Stokes for blame shortly before his death. At that point, the suppression of the story by the legacy media had just been defeated, so the details were new to Charlie and other commentators. We now have the advantage of a further ten days that were denied Charlie by his assassin.
The NC legal site doesn't allow me to access its material, maybe because I'm outside NC, or outside the US, so what I know about the role of the magistrate judge is based on general US and UK law (there may be some, presumably minor, differences in NC). As a magistrate judge, Stokes can adjudicate misdemeanors and petty offenses, like victimless traffic violations. She can hear criminal cases for the purpose of providing paper work and initial information to a qualified judge in a higher court, but she cannot adjudicate. She is a legal officer of first resort in her role of magistrate judge. In UK law, the position is simply termed "magistrate", and there are no legal exams to be passed in order to become or remain a magistrate. In both the UK and generally in the US, office holders are nominated by more senior law officers.
Now DeCarlos Brown came before Stokes, in January of this year, on a charge of wasting police time. He had phoned 911, and then told the responding officers that he was being controlled by a device within his body. That was all. He did not, for example, assault the officers or threaten them.
From all the information I can glean from outside NC, Stokes was simply in no position to place him in custody, both because of the limitations on her own jurisdiction, and because of the triviality of Brown's misdemeanor on this occasion.
Now even if Stokes is just the kind of law officer who would want to release violent criminals if she should ever pass her law exams to become a qualified judge in higher courts, you can see that this is irrelevant to the present case, which stands upon her very restricted powers, and upon the triviality of the particular charge that brought Brown before her in January.
So unless there is some relevant and substantial difference in the powers of NC magistrate judges, Stokes is surely a red herring in the story of DeCarlos Brown, and his ability to roam the streets.
Some responsibility may fall on previous (non-magistrate) judges, who had adjudicated on Brown's felonies, but these would have to be examined case by case - we cannot simply assume the conclusion that we prefer. Clearly, the US faces a major problem in the anarcho-tyrannical strategy of leftist judges freeing violent criminals, but that does not mean that Brown, specifically, was a "beneficiary" of this strategy (we know, for example, that he served a substantial custodial sentence in the past).
There are, however, two major factors at play that we already know about, without the need for examining further evidence:
1. the policy of de-institutionalizing the mentally ill, principally dating back in the US, I believe, to the 1980s (with "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest" effectively acclimatizing the public to this change).
2. the legacy media suppressing stories of black-on-white violent crime, while focusing on, or even inventing stories of white-on-black violent crime, generally seeking to give the impression that the US is a violent racist hell-hole that victimizes its black population; in standard DEI fashion, the unequal outcome of more black prisoners serving time for violent crime is supposedly, in itself, evidence of systemic racism wielded against them.
Unfortunately, the various naive, incompetent and malign actors behind both these contributing factors have not done anything that will bring them before a court in connection with the murder of Iryna Zarutska.
https://open.substack.com/pub/emburlingame/p/the-weaponization-of-demographics?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1gm72z