The Legal System Comes For White Parents
The Crumbley case, out of Michigan, represents more than you realize.
If you’re not caught up on this news, the Crumbleys are a couple from Michigan. Their son, Ethan, shot up his high school in 2021. He killed four people. Ethan got punished, as he was a rare school shooter who survived, but then something unprecedented happened, and the parents also got punished. They both were convicted of their role in everything (at a second-degree level), and got 10–15 years earlier this week.
That was the first time in American history that parents of a mass violence event perpetrator got jail time themselves.
Interesting little arc and case study with a lot to unpack.
One thing that’s immediately interesting is that it creates what we’d call a “slippery slope,” because a lot of parents aren’t that good at being parents, and like, OK, if their kid goes off the rails and does something horrible … now they need to go to jail? As self-involved but uninvolved-with-their-kids parents scramble to think about this reality, they went to the absolute immediate scapegoat they could: the black community. Ah-ha! There’s the answer! So like, if a black guy does something bad, and his dad left the family, can we punish the mom? Can we prosecute the grandmother? Heck yes! This is our “out” on this situation, right?
Matt Walsh basically carried water on this argument in a post from yesterday, where he desperately tries to not say “let’s prosecute all the absent black dads:”
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