The Blacktop Jungle
The only thing that has disappeared faster than white people in commercials is the enforcement of traffic laws on America’s roads
By Mark Cromer
As the Democratic National Convention was launching its Chicago gala for Vice President Kamala Harris, residents in Southern California awoke to news of another celebration that truly highlighted the Biden Administration’s success in running progressive policies aggressively downfield and into America’s End Zone.
In Los Angeles, several hundred savages seized a street and launched another Berserker’s Boulevard Ball, a carnival of crime the signature of which is wild-eyed ‘youth’ driving often stolen cars wildly in circles and filling the night air with roaring engines, screeching tires and burning rubber as the barbarians along for the ride hang out the windows flashing gang signs to the jubilant cheers of the insta-hive surrounding the makeshift arena.
The ABC News affiliate captured the grim moment of America’s present truth when a single LAPD patrol car pulled into the orgy of violent dysfunction only to discover its flashing lights served as Piranha chum and the cops’ cruiser was set upon by the mob, which attacked the police car and smashed out its rear window.
Pursuant to LAPD policy, the police immediately fled the scene.
It is unclear whether the officers sucked their thumbs on the way back to station where they were surely forced to don bibs and bonnets and undergo a diaper change before being spoon-fed another helping of sensitivity training gruel, but what is absolutely clear is the Berserkers’ total triumph on the streets of California and across so much of the nation now is simply indisputable.
And it’s not going to end anytime soon.
The street takeover is a hallmark of progressive governance—which is to say the choreographed collapse of civil society— and is hardly a new phenomenon, but rather a ritual that can be traced back to the late 20thCentury and one that has been increasingly popularized by Hollywood and fetishized by automakers’ marketing departments. While once encountered primarily in the urban wildlands of Baltimore, Philadelphia and Oakland, street takeovers have exploded across the country over the past four years and variants of Berserkers going buck wild behind the wheel are now being witnessed throughout the suburbs that once provided shelter to citizens seeking a general sense of safety.
In once quiet neighborhoods all over the country, law-abiding citizens—that long stabilizing demographic now merely relegated by the media to the status of frustratingly quaint—are encountering ‘Fuck the Police’ not just scrawled in graffiti across abandoned storefronts in disintegrating retail districts but are confronted with that sentiment brazenly burned into intersections like a circular target laid in rubber.
In Seattle, progressives throughout Puget Sound have electrified by the high-speed escapades of a self-styled comic book character known as the ‘Belltown Hellcat’ who carried the cause for social justice down the Emerald City’s narrow streets at speeds well over 100 mph in his Dodge Charger Hellcat SRT that has been modified to roar so loud it literally shook the sleeping tech giants awake at night.
The masked crusader was revealed to be 21-year-old Miles Hudson, who while reveling in his notoriety that was amplified by multiple stories in The New York Times was also careful to declare that objections to his Death Race 2024 street speeding were rooted in racism and he suggested that the city was poo-pooing his triple-digit joy rides because he has the misfortune of being black in a city that is predominantly white.
Just how unfortunate he can actually be, given his $100k+ set of wheels and his perpetual ‘get out of jail free’ card, seems obscured by the thrill Hudson has provided Puget Sounders.
Like LAPD’s cops-turned-cucks, Seattle police officers clearly got the memo in 2020 and The New York Times reported that during one of his traffic stops police officers had “pleaded” with Hudson to please stop hurtling down the city’s streets at more than 100 mph and perhaps find an actual race track instead. It was unclear if the Seattle officers had taken a knee before Hudson as they begged him to stop, but The New York Times has made it very clear just who they believe was in danger as a result of Hudson’s wilding behind the wheel: The Belltown Hellcat himself.
As a young black male, progressive orthodoxy holds and progressive policy asserts, Hudson was at greater risk even pulling over for watery-eyed and pleading Seattle police officers than when he was driving 140 mph down city streets. It’s a lie that has been spun into a myth that permeates from Compton to Capitol Hill (both in Seattle and the District of Columbia).
On August 1, more than four years after police agencies around the nation were ordered to stand back, stand down and stand away from all manner of street crimes and to cease virtually all meaningful patrol activities and enforcement of traffic laws, The New York Times published a front-page story in its national edition that ostensibly explored what citizens everywhere have known for years: driving (as well as cycling, jogging and walking) is now a deadly game of chance on the American roadway.
The story’s headline ‘Cities Scaled Back Traffic Stops, and Road Deaths Soared’ was a real hoot, since precious little in the way of traffic stops was ‘scaled back’ but rather suspended completely and it didn’t take long at all for all manner of drivers to understand that an honor system was suddenly in place, one that made speed limit signs to be little more than helpful suggestions and red lights to be nothing more than optional momentary rest stops.
And just as the rampaging mobs that swarmed and sacked cities all over America spread like a wildfire fed by the fuel of acquiescence as Berserkers pillaged and plundered with impunity, the elimination of traffic laws enforcement was correctly decoded by the mob as a greenlight to go Mad Max from the driver’s seat. The ensuing chaos has hardly been confined to city streets, as anyone driving the freeways and interstates in California or Washington couldn’t miss the great vanishing of California Highway Patrol and Washington State Patrol units from where they once could be seen throughout any given day: on the shoulder of the road behind another vehicle they had pulled over for a moving or vehicle violation.
In Los Angeles, police had been making more than a half-million traffic stops annually prior to 2020. As The New York Times celebrated, er, reported, that figure had plunged to fewer than 220,000 stops across sprawling City of Angels in 2023. To get pulled over in LA today a driver practically has to be dragging a body behind their vehicle, and even illegally towing a corpse might not do the trick considering the rewriting of pursuit policies in order to not further offend communities declared to be marginalized.
While Miles was taken into custody on August 12, according to the Renton Reporter, after a bench warrant was issued for a variety of pending charges; including stalking, domestic violence and assaulting his mother, progressives who are committed to doing the work across Northern Washington understand the allegations are merely the inevitable result of systemic inequities and institutional biases that disproportionally impact disadvantaged youth.
This is the mantra that progressives chant to themselves, and this is the psalm that they sing with pride in the crumbling public square.
Make no mistake about it, there is a direct correlation between the elimination of enforcing traffic laws and the widespread collapse of law and order across society that is showcased in the street takeovers that are now commonplace and the surging death toll unfolding on the American roadway. The resulting body count is viewed by progressives as simply a matter of the broken eggs one needs to make an omelet.
Automakers sense opportunity and have picked up and pushed Fast & Furious optics in the heartbeats of their marketing campaigns, with Dodge cashing in on the horrific death toll by unleashing a series of souped-up cars with variant names like the Hellcat, Demon and Jailbreak. They are hyped and marketed via ads that feature them burning rubber as they drift and do donuts. Not surprisingly, it’s a profit center gleefully embraced by the same corporate suits that will also decry gun violence and demand gun control even as they peddle death on four wheels.
In 2021, about 1,500 people were killed in California in speed-related violent incidents—calling deaths resulting from a car being driven at 140 mph an ‘accident’ is like calling deaths resulting from someone spraying gunfire randomly down a street an ‘unintended mishap’—according to a study conducted by the UC Berkeley Safe Transportation Research and Education Center. That figure rivals the death toll from gun violence in California for the same year, non-inclusive of suicides, as reported by the Center for Disease Control.
But when will we hear the calls for auto manufacturers to face legal liability for their marketing campaigns that celebrate illegal driving, despite the millisecond flash in 4pt font of ‘Professional driver on a closed course, do not attempt,’ from the same progressives who howl for lawfare campaigns against gunmakers?
We won’t, of course, because cars are not guns and as a result progressives agree that it’s people’s aberrant behavior who kill people, not vehicles.
So, Dodge and the rest of Detroit automakers’ C-Suite executives are all in as they dance across the red asphalt celebrating the spread of nihilism practiced on the streets that is evidenced by the speed of the passing cars and the hyper-Agro driving seen as Berserker’s swerve across the road, tailgate other drivers as an act of intimidation and turn the shoulder of the road into a triple-digit passing lane.
Just as the violent chaos that progressives unleashed during the summer of 2020 was embraced by corporations and perversely peddled to shareholders as community engagement, the carnage exploding across the American roadway today is passed off as a cultural rite of passage to which the only appropriate response from law-abiding citizens is to observe, grin and bear it.
Or join in.
As for the Belltown Hellcat, the Seattle ‘youth’ Miles Hudson was back at it in Jet City while the Democrats were getting all joyfully jiggy wit it in Chi-town. According to a news story published by the Renton Reporter,the masked crusader revved his engine and declared to his 750,000 followers on Instagram: “It sounds like a shotgun! I ain’t gonna lie, nigga!”
No, he ain’t gonna lie. Why should he? The boo-yaa roar of his Belltown Hellcat is his badge of honor and the pride of Puget Sound.
Why lie when the truth reflects your victory?
The mob of savages who recently seized even more streets in LA certainly told the God’s honest truth of our moment when they went wild in the wee hours and attacked the lone police cruiser that may as well have been dispatched as an Uber Eats delivering some Dunkin’ to the frenzied Berserkers.
As the Democrats passed around those 40oz joy juice jugs in Chicago, they had all the reason in the world to be ebullient, for the criminal horde on the streets of collapsing America were preaching progressive truth to the powerless police. That’s their glorious truth.
Welcome to the blacktop jungle.
