Locked Down in Third World California, by David Cole.

As I type these words, Californians are under a mandatory “stay at home” edict issued by the Patrick Bateman cosplayer in our statehouse. Any Californian caught leaving his, her, its, or zir home for “nonessential” reasons is subject to fine or imprisonment.

Yes, the state that removed criminal penalties for knowingly giving someone AIDS has imposed criminal penalties on anyone who might inadvertently spread Wuhanvirus. Yes, the open-borders governor who claims he has no moral authority to tell Mexicans to stay out has ordered all Californians to stay in.

And yes, the state that’s rapidly decriminalizing property crimes has criminalized going outdoors. A Californian who decides to take a walk in a park risks more severe penalties than an illegal alien who steals a TV. Cities like San Francisco have reclassified property crimes as non-arrest offenses (citation only, as if for jaywalking), and California as a whole has deemed theft of items valued at less than $950 a non-arrest offense (as a result, such thefts are rarely pursued by police). On the other hand, any violation of Gavin Newsom’s “stay at home” edict is “punishable by a fine of up to $1,000 or by imprisonment for no more than six months” (L.A.’s separate “stay at home” order carries the same penalties).

Here’s the funny part: Newsom has stated that he doesn’t believe imprisonment will actually be necessary in order to enforce the lockdown, because the mere threat of it will create a “social pressure” that will persuade Californians to comply on their own. A fascinating theory…the very presence of the threat of arrest and imprisonment acts as a force to compel compliance. So what happens when you remove that threat from crimes like robbery? You get looters running wild, because they risk no consequences.

In cities like Philly, the DA has directly ordered cops to stop making arrests for property crimes during the crisis, while in New York and other Democrat enclaves, activist DAs are pushing for the mass release of prisoners to “mitigate” the outbreak (see, quarantine only makes the law-abiding safe from the virus; for reasons left unexplained, quarantine is somehow unsafe for criminals).

Tucker Carlson has been rightfully enraged by the way in which these “progressive” DAs have been exploiting the virus to push an anti-enforcement agenda.